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Thread: Next Varroa Treatment

  1. #1
    Senior Member EmsE's Avatar
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    Default Next Varroa Treatment

    Morning Everyone,

    I've managed to get my first lot of bees through their first winter (probably good luck rather than good management). I'm sure I read somewhere that it is a good idea to treat bees for Varroa in April- is this right? If so what type of treatment would you recommend?
    I don't think they have a big problem with the mites but will send a floor scraping sample off to check(when the weather changes).

    Thanks

    EmsE

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    Administrator gavin's Avatar
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    Hi Ems

    Excellent that your bees have made it through the winter, and nice to see you contributing. I think that treatment in April is really only needed when there is a problem. If your bees are on a mesh floor then it is easy to check the sheet underneath to see how many are dropping over a period. If not, then when you have drone brood you can use a drone fork to inspect a sample of drone pupae and the mites will be easily visible.

    If you have a few per day dropping, or a small percentage of drone brood infested, then keep monitoring but you may be able to delay treating until the late summer. One favourite way of knocking them back in early summer is to put a shallow frame at each side of the brood nest as the colony is building up. If you already have little drone brood at the time and the bees are starting to feel prosperous, then they will probably make drone brood underneath the shallow super frames. The mites dive in just before sealing, and you cut it off with a hive tool and remove before they emerge.

    Did you treat in the autumn or winter?

    best wishes

    Gavin

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    This looks a good a place as any to join in.

    I was wondering the same as I specifically DIDN'T treat with Oxalic Acid over the winter maybe I'm doing my bees a disservice but it seemed a very harsh treatment to me so I decided to do a spring apiguard course instead. I did treat fairly late september into october if memory serves correct with Apiguard as part of the winter prep which knocked down a huge number of mites compared to what I was expecting from the weekly monitored drop.

    Being a little conscious of the time now I put an apiguard treatment on over the weekend on mine. I know it's a little cooler here (12-16 degrees during the day) that Vita recommend for Apiguard (15degrees) but as a 2-6 week treatment I wanted to get things moving before I end up trying to do everything at once on a single colony.

    I double checked the Vita information regarding problems associated with cutting treatment short and there don't appear to be any so I could possibly stop after a single tray if the mite drop still appears low.

    And yes, I'm aware a possible side effect is a reduction or cessation in the queen laying rate, but I didn't notice any effects in the autumn treatment and I'm keeping a close eye on this one.

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    Administrator gavin's Avatar
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    Hi Nellie

    If your mite drop this week is low I'd blame the weather and try again once it really does warm up in April. The trouble with treatments at this time of year is that they do need time, and you wouldn't want them on while the bees were bringing in honey. I would imagine that the rape might be flowering in your neck of the woods in about three weeks? Not really enough time to do a full Apiguard treatment. Given that your colony has 4 frames of brood at the moment it could be filling the brood box by the time the rape comes into flower, and needing its first super.

    If I was you I'd try the shallow frame trick. It will knock back the population if you do it well and probably allow them to get through to a late summer treatment. It also gives you a chance to fork out the drone brood (easiest when the brood is getting more mature) and get a clear idea of the load of mites they are carrying. You might have an option to treat in the June gap instead if your locals say there will be one, or hold off until the late summer after the main flow but before the autumn brood raising and maybe a balsam or ivy flow.

    There was a Dutch website that suggested that the recovered drone pupae make a nice stir-fry!

    I know that people say oxalic is hard on the bees, but then thymol fumes do clearly upset or annoy them. I don't think that there is a way to kill Varroa without affecting the bees somehow, short of letting them do it themselves (which, of course, very few can do).

    best wishes

    Gavin

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    Senior Member EmsE's Avatar
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    I did 1 floor sample on the hive last year which contained several weeks worth of debris (I was just learning) The varroa count came back as Nil?? The last treatment I gave the bees was oxalic acid at the end of November but I didn't get the opportunity to check the mite fall.

    So, Next step then is to establish the mite fall, then...
    * If low (or dare I hope for, nil), leave them and try the short frame in the brood box
    * if more than a couple a day then treat with.....

    I do like the idea of encouraging the drone brood. Seems much kinder.

    Gavin, I've just noticed your info on eating Drone pupae- ugg
    Last edited by EmsE; 30-03-2010 at 08:50 PM.

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    Administrator gavin's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by EmsE View Post
    I do like the idea of encouraging the drone brood. Seems much kinder.
    Not if you're a drone its not!



    A drawback of removing drone pupae is that unless there are other drones in the area then you may be making it more difficult to get queens mated.

    A nil Varroa count is unusual. With that along with a winter oxalic treatment you should not need to treat for a while. They should get through to a late summer treatment in a healthy state, but it is worth keeping an eye on the levels by looking at floor samples (if under a mesh floor - on a solid floor they might clean up before you see them) or by forking out some drone brood occasionally.

    best wishes

    Gavin
    Last edited by gavin; 30-03-2010 at 09:25 PM. Reason: can't spell queens

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    Administrator gavin's Avatar
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    Jan Tempelman was the guy recommending eating drone pupae. Recipe at the foot of this page:

    http://www.beedata.com/apis-uk/newsl...pis-uk0708.htm

    Whilst Googling I stumbled across this amazing article. Plenty ideas there for bee gourmets!

    http://www.fao.org/docrep/w0076E/w0076e19.htm

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    Senior Member Jon's Avatar
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    As a vegetarian for 30+ years I can't possibly recommend eating drone pupae but I came across this Dutch research.

    http://www.apiservices.com/articles/...one_method.htm

    Varroa mites are most often found in drone brood. Capturing mites in drone brood is nothing new. In fact, it was the first method used to combat the mites. But since not all mites were captured and many survived in the worker brood, this method was relatively ineffective and other methods were employed.

    Varroa mites propagate in brood cells. Research from the University of Wageningen (The Netherlands) has shown that the Varroa mites are 12 times more likely to enter drone cells versus worker cells. Therefore, If a situation is created wherein all of the mites are on the bees (and not in any brood) it is possible to catch a high percentage of the mites with a couple of drone cell brood frames. Capturing mites in broodless hives with drone cell frames is very effective. A broodless period is essential to this method since the mites, all on the bees, will be caught in the drone cells. This principle is used in biotechnical mite control methods.
    Last edited by Jon; 31-03-2010 at 05:14 PM. Reason: found link to replace cut and paste

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    Quote Originally Posted by gavin View Post
    Hi Nellie

    If your mite drop this week is low I'd blame the weather and try again once it really does warm up in April. The trouble with treatments at this time of year is that they do need time, and you wouldn't want them on while the bees were bringing in honey. I would imagine that the rape might be flowering in your neck of the woods in about three weeks? Not really enough time to do a full Apiguard treatment. Given that your colony has 4 frames of brood at the moment it could be filling the brood box by the time the rape comes into flower, and needing its first super.

    If I was you I'd try the shallow frame trick. It will knock back the population if you do it well and probably allow them to get through to a late summer treatment. It also gives you a chance to fork out the drone brood (easiest when the brood is getting more mature) and get a clear idea of the load of mites they are carrying. You might have an option to treat in the June gap instead if your locals say there will be one, or hold off until the late summer after the main flow but before the autumn brood raising and maybe a balsam or ivy flow.

    There was a Dutch website that suggested that the recovered drone pupae make a nice stir-fry!

    I know that people say oxalic is hard on the bees, but then thymol fumes do clearly upset or annoy them. I don't think that there is a way to kill Varroa without affecting the bees somehow, short of letting them do it themselves (which, of course, very few can do).

    best wishes

    Gavin
    On the plus side, in the middle of Bristol we don't get much OSR the downside, from my point of view, at the moment is that my "drone comb" is currently full of stores so I daren't even knock it off to let them draw it out at the moment. It will have to go at some point as they drew out worker comb rather than drone comb anyway, catching it at a point where it's low on stores and not full of brood is one of this season's challenges I think.

    I will admit to a degree of trepidation publicly admitting that I didn't treat with OA and that I slapped Apiguard on so early in the season, but I did my best to make an informed decision. In an ideal world I wouldn't use apiguard either, but as a single colony beekeeper at the moment, that's a big risk to take especially as it looks like both the other colonies in the apiary at best will need to be combined if we're to have more than one colony between us over the next couple of weeks.

    I know bees don't like Thymol much and that I'm risking stopping the queen laying at a fairly crucial point but at the moment I don't trust the mite counts that I saw last year (or my maths, one of the two) and I've agonised over whether not treating with OA was the right thing to do. That said, if the forecast doesn't improve I'm quite happy to run up in between showers and take it off again if it doesn't look like much good is being done and fall back to drone culling; something else I don't really want to do if I can help it as my gut feeling (i.e. I've absolutely no evidence to back it up) is that the combination of trying to reduce the number of drones being raised to begin with AND then culling them as part of varroa IPM can't be a good thing.

    Nasty little barstewards aren't they? Leave them alone they almost certainly kill your bees and everything else you can do is trying to judge which is the lesser evil you can inflict on them this week. I'm going to stand by my decision though, it's a 4-6 week treatment and by the end of that time I want to be agonising over whether they should be drawing out supers or the 14x12 frames I want to move the artificial swarm onto. I've got 8 drawn super frames, 30 of foundation in varying stages of construction plus all the 14x12s AND I want at least a pot of honey this year

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    Administrator gavin's Avatar
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    Hi Nellie

    Yup, they're unpleasant critters.

    Even if the Apiguard isn't working properly it is probably not doing much harm so there is no need to take it off. Low temperatures may make it ineffective, but if so it is likely that the low evaporation means that the queen can ignore it.

    You can remove a first cycle of drone raising then let them complete it next time.

    Do you have good queens in the two colonies you want to combine? Starvation risk is probably nearly over and the spring build-up underway. If I had two small colonies with good queens I'd just leave them alone for now. I hesitate to combine queen-less or drone laying queen colonies with good ones as there is a risk you'd lose the good queen.

    best wishes

    Gavin

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