We have all seen butterflies and moths, we all know what ants do and we all know that there are quite a lot of animals out there that REALLY like honey.
But did you know that one of the most persistent threats is actually the wax moth?
The wax moth gets its name from the fact that its larvae eats bees wax – it also eats pretty much anything else it finds in the hive.
So how does a wax moth get into the hive and what does it do when it’s there?
If we consider the yearly cycle of a colony we know that there are periods during the year when the hive is a very cramped place and there are periods when it’s like an empty box with a really interesting decor.
The wax moth is naturally weary of the honey bee – it knows that things are not going to end well if it’s caught inside the hive – so how then does the wax moth get its eggs into the wax?
The wax moth will typically arrive at a hive in the early/mid autumn, bee numbers are seriously down on summer/spring and so there’s less chance of being spotted as they enter.
The key fact to know about the colony in the autumn is that it will have a lot of unoccupied space, there will be built frames but in terms of a population patrolling it, it will be sparse in places.
Strangely enough it appears that a wax moths favourite place to mate is actually in the hive, so a male moth will arrive first and start signalling to any local females (using an ultrasonic signal).
The female will then arrive and they’ll mate.
Later the female wax moth finds a quiet area of the hive and lays her eggs, the moth itself does not eat the wax, only the larvae does.
The wax moth lives for months (varies depending on the breed), so potentially this act is repeated many times.
The eggs will then lay dormant for a few days, lying in the bees chambers.
When the larvae emerges it will start eating, whilst it is still small it will eat around itself, as it get bigger it will ‘travel’.
The image below shows the development stage of the wax moth larvae (I have omitted the chrysalis stage and emergence as a moth).
The above is not to scale, I simply made each stage large enough to be seen and understood.
At the point when the larvae starts travelling it’s at this point that the bees start getting really upset.
As the larvae travels it eats tunnels through everything, wax, honey, pollen stores – baby bees.
It not only eats a path of destruction but in an attempt to stop others following it, it leaves a substance comparable to a spiders web behind itself, this material acts as a barrier to the bees and makes a real mess of the larvaes path.
If you’d like to see what the larvae leaves behind it and the damage it causes have a look in the gallery (in the pests and wax section), the gallery also contains close up shots of one that I caught – I was going to mount it in the drawing room like a trophy but the wife wasn’t impressed.
One of the peculiarities of the wax moth larvae is that it seems to travel in straight lines, so detection, although manual, is a little easier.
In order to detect the larvae you need only hold the frame up to the light (a bright light source), the larvae path shows up as it is the only straight line that’s more than a few millimetres long.
It is possible to treat for wax moths but at present I don’t – maybe I will in spring.
So you now have an understanding of what the moth does and how it does it but what is the resultant effect?
Simply put the bees are not happy, they’re levels of aggression are a lot higher if the larvae are present and the colony will be slow to increase its size whilst it combats the larvae (it is possible to have lots of larvae in a single hive or just one – or none), this then impacts honey production.
When the bees do find a larvae and manage to get to it they will mob it and throw it out, either that or encrust it in propolis (I’ll explain what this is in another article).
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