This may be a daft newbee suggestion (or a PPB comment for those attending the Centenary) but if the weather has been poor and the bees not out flying as much over the summer etc, is there not a correlation that mite presence would have increased and be more prolific ad contact with bees in the hive increased? Or an I being too simplistic?
Last edited by HJBee; 18-09-2012 at 10:09 PM.
In fact it has been said that the opposite may be true. Good foraging means booming colonies and booming colonies raise lots and lots of mites. Maybe they raise proportionately more drone brood, or maybe they just take their eye off the ball, in a manner of speaking. But clearly there is a lot we don't understand about mite dynamics.
No, far from a PPB comment. I have a feeling that you are never going to be a practitioner of PPB. Seems to be the Kilbarchan way.
The key thing with mites is to assume that they are always present and don't kid yourself that you can get away without treating.
People like Michael Bush in the US get away with it somehow but locally, the guys who skip treating for whatever reason nearly always get wiped out by varroa.
'natural' beekeepers like Phil Chandler have lost all their colonies 3 times as he reported on biobees last year, and are now rowing back furiously with regard to mite treatment. Thymol is ok if applied on a home made string but is part of the corporate death star when purchased from Vita or its ilk.
LOL! Gotta love that corporate death star.
Signed the petition yet?
http://www.biobees.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=13328
I'm all for those online petitions, they keep people too lazy to actually do something about something they supposedly care about happy, inside, out of trouble and believing that anyone, of any relevance, gives two hoots that 100,000 people clicked "like" on Facebook rather than have them staggering around outside where they might hurt themselves, other people, or hold up traffic.
At least 100,000 pieces of paper causes a bit of nuisance when you plonk it on the doorstep of Number 10 or outside the head office of corporate death star. I suspect it takes the Chairman of Corporate Death Star's secretary's computer considerably less than a second to empty the Junk Mail folder at the end of the day when he/she goes home on they day they forward it on.
Last edited by Neils; 18-09-2012 at 10:54 PM.
Nothing worse than getting tangled up in a mass of disorientated humans who have eaten too many yellow flowers for breakfast or in some sort of a side salad.
Be careful out there!
PPB? Petunia Pickle Bottom; Party Political Broadcast ... ?Originally Posted by HJBee
Pretty (ahem) Poor Beekeeping.
You must be taking the P?
Piss Poor Beekeeping is now regarded as a subset of the whole gamut of things lumped under CCD. If you lost colonies in the US in those years, the temptation was to blame CCD. Many seem to believe that there is/was something new which the realists reckon could be something like an interacting set (or sets) of pathogens together with stress from poor or poor quality forage and maybe beekeeper or farmer pesticides. Although epidemiological studies of losses in the field failed to link that last one with the losses, there are still niggling doubts.
Last edited by gavin; 20-09-2012 at 12:34 PM.
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