I have had hive beetles since october of last year.  At first glance the
are a black insect with a hard shell.  The shell is round.  This makes
it difficult for the housebees to remove them.  When you open a hive
they run as soon as the light hits the frames.  At first they were just
a hive pest.  It was learned in the Spring of this year that they went
into the top supers and cracked the honey comb that was sealed.  This
causes the exposed honey to collect moisture and ferment.  The hive
develops an smell of oranges.  You also see alot of moisture on the top
of the frames which have frames which that have been damaged.  This
causes the bees to bee pushed down and out of the hive.  The last thing
the beetle does is lay eggs in the exposed honey cells.  the eggs
develop to about 1/2" in length.  After a period of time they travel
down trough the hive and either gather on the bottom board in mass or
they travel down the bottom board and drop to the ground.  Here they
grow and develop into the pupa stage and new beetles are developed and
the cycle starts again.  There are no approved controls:  Dursban, a
soil treatment, can be used under the hive on the ground to break the
cycle.  A trap can be devloped to catch the larve as they drop from the
bottom board.  One of the journals indicated that you could take a piece
of corrigated card board and split it in two to expose the ridges.  lay
it on the bottom board.  The beetles like to lay in the between the
ridges.
 
symptom: you see the beetles
                Your recognize a wet super
                you see the larve
                You dig in ground below the hive and the larve in the
ground.
 
Clemson University has a new 6 page brochure on the Hive beetle
http://www.clemson.edu.  To read the brochure which is a pdf file you
will need a reader.  you can download adobe reader.  Save the file to a
disk and open the file using the reader.  I hope this has been helpful.
Ron Taylor, president of South carolina Beekeepers.
 
Richard Spiekhout wrote:
 
> How do you check for beetles?
> Richard