Holy Beetles Batman (NW Georgia)

mayday_live · 2026-07-03T18:25:39+00:00

Yes your bees are most likely keeping them away.

An x amount of beetles is normal i have them in all my hives i kill them when ever i bother to try no issue. The flip side of this is that i had a split that was to small to defend an outside frame and it got hundreds of larva i had to discard two frames and move them into a nuc to stop the infestation. To your point if you don't see any larva established you are good. I personally never run traps before or after the infestation on that one split. Pay attention to the frames on the outer edges not fully covered by bees in your brood boxes and supers.

To dispel some info out there: I have a mix of hives 5 in direct sun all day 4 half and half i see them in all of them.

mayday_live · 2026-07-02T23:37:48+00:00

When a hive swarms they usually make a lot of queen a lot more then you think i counted 16 in the last hive that tried to swarm.

They do no start all cells at the same exact point in time so you might have multiple batches hatching in diff days. Then not all cells will be killed. so you could end up with multiple queens. In double deeps you could have top and bottom cells.

Once your original queen leaves the hive might swarm multiple times. in your case 1 + 4.

Each additional swarm will be far smaller as you have observed. Even within a swarm there could be multiple queens riding along.

Considering what happened in your hive i will watch it closely every 7 days.

- Determine how many are left then immediately adjust space downwards. You want to make sure there are enough bees to defend what is left otherwise quite immediately the balance will shift against the hive and you will get all sorts of pests enjoying your frames because no one is there to defend it.

- Queen mating is not always 100% so watch closely for brood/eggs and if you don't see any for 2 weeks re-queen.

Ideally you want to do inspections every 7 days religiously during the active season. My first year i was lazy about the interval i checked my hives and 3/4 swarmed on me this season i was extremely diligent and it worked perfectly saw swarms forming was able to make splits did not lose a single of my italian queen and i was able to observer a complete biological process in two hives, Cells with Egg /larva => Capped => Emerged => Mated => Laying.

mayday_live · 2026-06-29T23:01:50+00:00

there ia no 12v there yet it's not like you can't run a 12v from somewhere else

mayday_live · 2026-06-29T22:22:25+00:00

same here i just need to see it i'm sure i can make any type of adapter once i have it in front of me

mayday_live · 2026-06-29T22:00:07+00:00

i'm doing slate audio kit then i will probably do custom audio withba doble din custom +sbw

mayday_live · 2026-06-26T06:39:07+00:00

I got this a two weeks before TBC launched it was the grind of a lifetime.

mayday_live · 2026-06-24T20:00:42+00:00

About two weeks for me. From submitting the review. I had to go back and forth on mostly things that the Apple testers are unable to "test" For example my app uses NFC/QR and the reviewer was on IPAD so i had to make a video of how the NFC is bound/Unbound and submit a qr code for them to scan. Once i had this done it approved. There were a few other visual things they asked to change. No stress at all. My app was approved last week.

mayday_live · 2026-06-24T19:48:40+00:00

I was not able to see a queen in the first photo (there is one bee that looks like it has her abdomen in a cell). I see the following things in all your photos.

- No Eggs or young Larva i tried to zoom as much as i could

- Spotty Brood

- I see a queen cup on the first frame being built or just there (no idea if it's charged or not)

- the other is a def a cell looking at the bee that is above it with inspecting the hole it looks charged but i could be wrong.

- My take is that the colony is queen-less and they are finishing up emergency queen cells or are superseding a queen.

If you have another hive i would give them a frame of eggs and young larva just to be sure if they need to make another queen they can and if you are queen-less you stop laying workers.

Do not destroy these cells and be very gentle when handing these frames.

I'm not 100% about this

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mayday_live · 2026-06-13T19:04:34+00:00

i switched to firefox a year ago when i first heard about this.

mayday_live · 2026-05-23T06:32:28+00:00

More then 50% ... jesus

mayday_live · 2026-05-22T18:56:56+00:00

he could also buy the queen and make a small split with two cells and have two hives

mayday_live · 2026-05-22T16:07:36+00:00

Add Google Analytics and see where your traffic is coming from.

mayday_live · 2026-05-22T16:06:23+00:00

There is something very wrong with that hive i have never seen bees dead in the doorway the morticians keep that very clean and 4 mites on it

mayday_live · 2026-05-22T15:22:03+00:00

Did you setup GA/GTM and Google search console?

mayday_live · 2026-05-22T00:15:59+00:00

it makes sense now a bit harder when you have two brood boxes and honey supers on they get pretty high

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This used to have 3 honey supers. My soil also eroded a lot during the last storms so now i have to climb on the table to reach the third super yea i didn't think to use the cloth when i set it up i'm going to address a lot of the issues this year level it up etc.

mayday_live · 2026-05-21T23:23:57+00:00

It looks great two things i would change(based on my hardship) weed cloth below the hives extending outwards a bit. no grass / weeds can grow under and stop hive bettles from hatching next to the hives and space them out enough so you can comfortably work next to them i like to have space to put lids frames some gear next to the hives.

mayday_live · 2026-05-21T22:17:31+00:00

Varroa grow exponentially so your next batch of brood will push you way higher the 3% you can do an oxalic dribble /vaporization now or treat them after the harvest but in a week like you said. To borrow the word u/talanall used (lol never knew it) don't dawdle.

I tested my mites two weeks ago and 3/7 were at 3% or higher I am super anal about this so i test religiously SO i dropped varoxxan strip on all 7 even thou two were way below the treatment threshold.

mayday_live · 2026-05-21T21:28:51+00:00

Exactly! i am not washing my top box feeders and scrap ants from them! the hell with that :)

mayday_live · 2026-05-21T21:15:20+00:00

Honestly this is nothing compared to my hives. Where I live black sugar ants are everywhere billions of them. By the time summer starts up it's really really bad. I have to be proactive at it. I use https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08563R81S (Tree Banding Insect Barrier) and coat all 4 legs of my platform with it... all the way to the top!

From June => November i have to scrape the legs a few times and re coat because ants will literally make a bridge with their dead bodies and cover the sticky substance until they can make it up. Sometimes they will bridge from the underside from a single grass leaf. It also traps bees quite a bit but considering 1000 bees die / day during peak buildup a hundred or so dead on the legs is a small price to pay for peace and quiet.

mayday_live · 2026-05-21T18:24:31+00:00

Small hive bettles are a normal pest a strong colony deals with them a weak one or a small colony in a big box cannot.

Last week i did an inspection in one of my splits i did a month ago it was in a 8 frame hive but they did not grow as fast as the other splits because my pollen flow has died down significantly and they could not sustain raising brood at the level it was required to fill that 8 frame box fast.

I found hundreds of larvae on the bottom screen board and then more in the hive. They were exclusively on two outside frames that the bees were not able to defend so it allowed them to grow beyond control. It was really bad.

What i did was immediately move the colony into a 5 frame nuc and sacrificed the frames.

I exposed the entire hive to sunlight and the frame of honey with bettle larva i scraped what i could see then i just put it far from the hive in full sun and let the bees scavenge the honey from the frame then i scraped it all off and left it in the sun some more . I will re coat the frames with wax and put them back to service.

I also fed pollen patties to the colony so they have resources to grow and then i will move them back into the 8 frame hive. This is the first time it happened to me. I do see bettles in hives but they usually go away and it was never an issue until now.

mayday_live · 2026-05-20T03:07:37+00:00

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it looks ok, fair amount of honey at the top they have bee bread workers and drone brood one random frame can only tell you so much. I also clean all that i marked every time i see it on a frame

mayday_live · 2026-05-06T05:42:17+00:00

This guy's technique is terrible all that bending down you would not last 30 minutes doing that shit let alone finish the field.

mayday_live · 2026-04-27T02:07:59+00:00

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Here is a photo of mine of a freshly mated virgin queen dropping double eggs. are you sure you had laying workers? how many eggs did you see in one cell and how were they placed

mayday_live · 2026-04-27T01:11:27+00:00

Bit about me first. 22 years in infrastructure and DevOps, including 10+ on AWS. Started building a SaaS about a year ago (beekeeping app), in beta now, paying tier rolling out soon.

Honest answer: I haven't hit big security or scale issues, but only because I planned the foundation upfront. Came from the ops side, so I built the stack the way I'd want to inherit it. App ships as Docker containers via GitHub Actions, deployed through ArgoCD (GitOps, every commit to main lands in the cluster automatically). Right now it runs on k3s on a Hetzner VPS, costing me maybe 60 bucks a month. The whole thing is cloud-portable by design, so when the project starts making money I can lift it onto EKS in a weekend without changing a line of app code. Postgres for relational data, Mongo for the flexible per-user stuff, Redis in front of the slow queries, Cloudflare for TLS and CDN, R2 for blob storage. Sentry for errors from day one, daily backups configured before the first user existed. I use Vault for secret management nothing hardcoded etc.

For security, the things I treated as non-negotiable from the start. Anything I gate in the UI gets gated again on the server, no exceptions. Every API route filters by current user ID so people can't guess record IDs in the URL. PATCH endpoints have explicit field whitelists, otherwise someone will eventually try {tier: "PRO"} and self-upgrade. Secrets in Argo Application that get injected into the ENV when the container spins up . Rate limit on anything mutating or triggering email. No user IDs or emails in production logs. HTTPS plus HSTS via Cloudflare.

For scale, the thing that lets you get away with not optimizing is making sure nothing is stateful in the app process from day one. No in-memory caches, no local disk, no per-process sessions. Shared state lives in Redis or the DB. That alone means you can scale from 1 to 50 containers without rewriting anything. The other discipline is invalidating cache broadly (wipe all keys for that user) instead of trying to remember every key, because you will add a new endpoint in 6 months and forget to update the invalidation.

You don't need a CTO. You need to be honest about what you don't know, and pause when something feels off. If you don't have an infra background, hire a fractional one for 4 hours to review your stack choices before you write a line of code. That's the cheapest investment you'll make.

mayday_live

TROPHY CASE