beemac

Hi all, Has anyone else noticed small black beetles eating and destroying new buds on Manuka plants? These beetles are damaging new buds which do not form into flowers. Any info would be great.

Please note this video was made by Apivita, Croatia. I am amazed there is so much negativity by some beeks. This product has been passed by MPI under the ACVM as an oral nutritional compound and does not require registration but may be sold as a nutritional product. This was approved on 25/5/15. NZ does have some problems with bee health and Nosema can be the the outcome. Nobody knows this more than us on the Coromandel 2014 and some of us welcome any product that can help. Please draw your own conclusions concerning this video, it is not ours but is on u tube. We sell this product as a

Tests found both Nosema apis and Nosema Ceranae. To my knowledge no-one has used fiprinol. The scientist beekeeper up our way tested for chemicals and found none. A lot of hives were showing symptoms late winter early spring decreasing to only a hand full of bees down to total depopulation. Not all hives were this drastically affected but certainly had reduced bee numbers. Even some healthy sites still tested positive for Nosema. This problem was reported to MPI who came up to check hives in the area and take bee samples for testing.

Our hives have never been used for pollination and next to no chemical sprays have been used in the area. Definitely not a treatment problem related to varroa. Nosema has become the problem, the highest nosema spore count per bee was10 million 350 thouand per bee, with most other sites/bees tested showing high counts. Scary stuff. We have been beekeeping for over 20 years and now we have an additional problem to contend with and manage.

Some of us sure had these exact problems on the Coromandel. High nosema spore counts and also Lotmaria was detected. Large hive losses and much weakened hives. Many more beekeepers in the same areas also had the same.

Depending on how many you have to clean, what we have done is made a frame out of metal queen excluders with four excluders nailed in a line and angled approx 45 degrees with 2 screws at the bottom of each excluder long enough to hold 5 plastic queen excluders each. (queen excluders fit behind the head of screw thus holding the bottom of excluders in place). This works great with a high pressure/steam cleaner. We blast each side of the 5 excluders, then turn the top excluder over to do the back and repeat process on next layer of excluders.