How to Prevent Wax Moth Damage in Brood Frames – Simple Protection That Works
Laurence Edwards explains how wax moth larvae damage brood frames and why healthy colonies naturally suppress them. The key: freeze all frames for 24-48 hours at season's end and store them in a cold, sealed shed. Avoid over-stacking supers and match hive boxes to colony size.
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Hi, I'm Lawrence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping and a super short Bite Size Bees. So in this video, I'm going to talk to you about wax moth, the damage that it can do, and how to prevent your frames turning into this. So wax moth, it is a real pain. It's a moth that comes in, lays its eggs in wax, The larvae eat the wax, leave all of these trails, all of this horrible stuff here, and then they fly off to go and find some more wax. They destroy boxes so, so quickly. They really do. You find this in nature though. Everything has a purpose. Obviously, when you get like an old cavity in a tree, you'll get an old colony of bees. They'll go, they might be abscond, and they'll leave it. And the wax moth is nature's way of recycling that into earth. For beekeepers, It is an absolute nightmare. There isn't actually a recognized treatment for this in the UK anymore. Now, the reason this frame looks like this is this is a secondhand box that was given to me. It's been kept somewhere for a while. I've just done a video on secondhand equipment and I've noticed that all of the frames have gone like this. So this was destined for the fire anyway. But in this video, I just wanted to give you a closeup, show you a little bit like the damage of what a wax moth can do and tell you how you can solve it and make sure that your frames don't end up like this. So the first thing to say is wax moth is an issue at certain times of the year, and bees are very, very good in their hive at managing wax moth on their own. So if you have a colony of bees in one box like that and they've filled the box out completely, the chances of you getting a wax moth infestation in a box of bees that's filling the box— very, very slim, almost zero I would say, because bees are very good. They'll just go and kill anything and take it away. If you were to have a box of bees like that Completely full. With loads of boxes stacked up on top, so it's only say 25% full, you could get a wax moth infestation up here. So wax moth infestation can occur anywhere where you have frames that aren't covered in bees. Now it's a little bit of a myth that the wax moth will only go for frames with brood in. They definitely prefer it, without a shadow of a doubt. They will go for the richness that comes with the cappings that come from the brood. So there's a definite preference for brood frames, I have seen wax moth larvae personally in supers, in really fresh supers, and I've seen them a couple of times on foundation as well, so they will go for it. The brood box is definitely where you want to focus your attention though, in terms of any treatments and in terms of any methods for killing that wax moth. So it's kind of a two-pronged attack really. The first one is make sure that your box fits the colony, and that's something that I always say in beekeeping. Don't turn up at the beginning of the year and you've got a box full of bees and just stick 4 supers on. Not a very good method of management. You want to gradually put the supers on, gradually adjust the size of the cavity to fit your colony of bees. If you've got, no matter what size your box is, so if you've got single brood, double brood, however many supers, if it's always full of bees, then in the summer those frames should be safe from wax moth infestation. As the colony starts to retract later on in the year, if you're leaving anything up at the top or if you're going down with a double brood, then you get a little bit of susceptibility. And I find though, in the colony, It's never too, too bad. The bees tend to take care of it. This damage happens when you take these frames out for storage. And I know some people like to store them wet, some people like to wrap them in cling film. What you need to do is you need to reduce the chance of wax moth coming in and laying eggs into this frame. If you can restrict that, then you're halfway there. That is the major battle. What might happen is you restrict it and you've missed one or two, And then they grow into a wax moth and then they go around and they lay eggs. So you can get an infestation if you're just restricting the access. The other one is doing some form of treatment. Now I'm not going to go into detail on any of these treatments. All I'm going to say is that the only way that you can be really, really sure to make sure that you're not getting any wax moth whatsoever is at the end of the season, freeze all of your frames for maybe 24 to 48 hours. Give them a really good Deep freeze, and then put them into a secure environment where you're putting maybe a couple of sheets of newspaper in between stacks of four, maybe some Perspex crown boards, sealing them up, making sure there's no holes, ratcheting them down really, really tight, and reducing any of that access. What we do here is we keep a lot of our supers outside, so they're not open to the elements, but they're they're outside. So when it gets cold here and it gets very cold in North Wales, as you see earlier on in the year some of the videos. down to like -12, -16. They're outside, so they're in like effectively a shed. It gets very cold and you get a natural freeze at that time of the year. So you might get a little bit of infestation coming on maybe like November, December, and then you get that January, February snap and it kills everything off. So we can deal with a little bit of the infestation, and that is a perfectly natural method to keeping wax moth down to manageable levels. Now there are chemical treatments available. But they're not approved for use in the UK, so you cannot use any of those treatments. I know Certan are looking at a BS 402, which will be the next approved treatment, and I've not yet seen that come to market. It was an expensive product when it was the BS 401 formulation, but at least it was a registered product and something that you could use to treat for wax moth. That's as much as I'm going to say on the matter though. If you're a small-scale beekeeper, the The best method that you can use, take your frames off at the end of the season, freeze them down, put them into storage, make sure it's secure, ratchet them nice and tight, preferably leave them somewhere where they're going to get access to a good bit of chill over winter, but obviously none of the moisture, so completely away from any rain or anything like that. And that's going to give you your best chance of getting your frames through the winter into the season without the wax moth creating any damage on them. So there you go, that's it for the video. We've discussed what wax moths do, the damage they do to frames, And a really neat, simple way to help eliminate them and keep your frames wax moth-free. So as always, hope you enjoyed the video. Please hit the subscribe button, please hit the bell so you're notified of every video, and I'll see you next time.
