Identification please.

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Davelin

Field Bee
Joined
Sep 2, 2010
Messages
966
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2
Location
North Somerset
Hive Type
14x12
Number of Hives
10
Can anyone tell me what this is please. See attached file (I hope it works, first time I've tried this.) I found several on my varroa floor (but only 1 varroa). Is this a bee louse? Do I need to do anything about it?

Thanks
 
Hmmm... bit too blurry to see. But it does look at bit like a bee louse (they look a bit like small flies with fat legs and no wings). Dave Cushman's website has an entry which for some reason the Forum's url coding won't accept (www. dave-cushman. net/bee/braula). It's a bit whiskery-looking though, so I wouldn't like to say for sure.

You could have a closer peer at them and see if they seem to fit the various Google images available. They're not particularly harmful, but like all these things if they look as if they're becoming abundant in the hive then something is probably amiss. NB. you're probably most likely to see them in the more laissez-faire kind of system, as they are less tough to kill than mites and probably disappear when strong anti-varroa measures are taken.

I don't recall seeing one since I kept someone else's bees for them ages ago, and then we didn't really bother much about them.
 
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All the pictures of the bee louse show them without antennae, whereas this has quite prominent ones. I will try to get a better pic if I find any more
 
Could be some kind of pollen mite was told by a guy from the NBU that not necessarly all bugs living on inspestion board are bad for bees.
 

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