Where Moths Doth Corrupt

“Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal:”  Matthew 6:19

In our first year of beekeeping we were successful in catching four swarms of honeybees.  When you catch them like that, they're priced right - FREE.  As of right now, we have three of the four hives.  We lost one.  In 1787 Benjamin Franklin was asked about what form of government the founders were establishing.  He answered, "A republic, if you can keep it."  He was stating the obvious and something we are all too familiar with - A republic is hard to keep, and comes with a tall order for the citizens to have the responsibility to maintain it.

Similarly, we were gifted bees and they were ours - if we could keep them.  We learned firsthand about the responsibility to keep them.  Even doing our best, we lost one of them to WAX MOTHS.  The wax moth (Galleria mellonella) might have a fancy name, but they ruined one of our hives.  If you have a strong hive, they will keep these scavengers in check.  If you don't, they'll take over.  

Moths will enter the hive and lay eggs in a hidden place where the bees won't see them.  The larva hatches and eats through the comb and honey, spinning webs and cocoons.  They mature to a larva that's about an inch long.  Then they pupate and overwhelm and destroy the hive.   It's easy to blame the wax moths, but the real question to ask is, "Why was the hive so weak that it couldn't protect itself?"  It could be that they lost their queen.  Or perhaps she was just not laying enough eggs.  Maybe varroa mites weakened the colony.  

Whatever happened, all we can do is clean up the box and frames.  I put on my bee suit and went and got it.  I pulled off the top and you can see the damage immediately.  Can you see all the cocoons?  I started to scrape all that off with my hive tool.

They even ate into the wood.  I actually pulled out two larva that were still alive.  They weren't alive for long, though.

You can see how they decimated the frames and foundation, just destroying all the drawn comb.

The entire side of the box was almost completely covered with cocoons.

It took me a couple of hours of scraping, brushing and then using compressed air to blow out the mess.  Now that they're cleaned up, we we be able to use them again, but they'll only be used on strong hives in the event there are more alive that I didn't see.  In the future, if we see one hive getting weak, we'll stack those on top of a stronger hive.  Maybe we'll save it that way.