Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

ocba - Re: [ocba] Black Ants!

ocba AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Orange County, NC Beekeepers

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Randall Austin <ra41717 AT gmail.com>
  • To: Zac Morris <zac AT zacwolf.com>
  • Cc: ocba AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [ocba] Black Ants!
  • Date: Sat, 20 Apr 2013 12:53:44 -0400

Zac,

Before I did anything elaborate with trays of oil & the like, I would tinker with the inner cover issue and see what difference that makes. One thing to keep in mind is that inner covers are not necessary at all. You can get rid of the inner cover without affecting your bees whatsoever. Given that fact, screening off the handhold in an inner cover doesn't make a whole lot of sense. You are just creating a nice warm attic for any random creature to thrive in, where the bees cannot enter to police it.

I usually do have inner covers on my hives but that's really just from convention rather than necessity. From a hive beetle control standpoint, the wise thing to do would be to eliminate inner covers altogether.

I often have ants in around the edges of the aluminum tops of my outer covers. I never see them actually inside the hive on the comb. I suspect that they are benign. Could they even be beneficial, if they feed on other bugs and clean up scraps around the perimeter of the hive boxes? I don't doubt that an overwhelming number of ants would be a problem, but for me, I've never been bothered with all that many.

Randall Austin

On 4/20/2013 12:10 PM, Zac Morris wrote:
My third season of keeping bees.  I remove the top cover today and it's FULL of big black ants!  I had placed screen on my inner hive cover "port" so the ants were not down in the hive itself, just in the space between the inner cover and the rain cover.

So I cleared them all off, inspected the hive (no ants inside it).  Hive was doing very well!

No ants in my other hives either.

So I now have two questions:

1) Screen on the inner hive port: I've gotten two very different opinions on this practice.  
  1. The man that lead the class I took down in Southern Pines said you should block the port to prevent robbing.
  2. Someone else told me that you should not.
  • Opinions?  Would unscreened have prevented the ants from setting up shop in the top area, or would it have allowed them to get down in the hive?
2) Ants: I have my hive bottom setting on a cinder-block.  I was considering two possible approaches.
  1. Shallow pan, place the cinder-block down in the pan, then fill the pan with a shallow layer of mineral oil.
  2. Slather the cinder-block in Vaseline.
  • both, or something else?
THANKS!
-Zac



_________________________________________
ocba mailing list | North Carolina Beekeeping| http://www.theocba.org/
Manage Your Subscription: http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/ocba/




Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page