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Thread: 2011 varroa levels

  1. #21

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    Alan Teal said much the same thing in an Email to me a couple of years ago when I suggested the SBA mag was leading beekeepers up a blind alley by printing so many articles suggesting non treatment was a route to resistance.
    He was SBA president at the time I think ? he gave me his formula for thymol treatment so I'm pretty sure he treated his own bees but still believed the principle of letting the bees die would lead somewhere eventually.

    Things went from bad to worse with a certain contributor encouraging the release of swarms which once they were feral bees would breed resistance ????
    How the -### is that supposed to work ??
    You can't keep them alive in a protected environment but they are going to become super bees left to their own devices ?

  2. #22
    Senior Member Jon's Avatar
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    Ferals have a chance if they are well isolated from other bees as you don't get the problems associated with drifting and robbing and cross transfer of mites.
    Letting hives swarm themselves into oblivion with a view to establishing feral colonies is an exercise in futility.

    I must read the Arnot forest paper again as it looked at a lot of this stuff.

  3. #23

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    Most of the crazy ideas about resistance and feral bees are all in "Breeding Better Bees" Milner and Dews which is a BIBBA book.
    Somebody should revise that text before it leads anyone else up the garden path.

    'http://biobees.libsyn.com/interview-...rray-mc-gregor

    here's a link from the site you mention its an interview with Murray MacGregor about the Carniolans he is importing.

    Gavin gets a mention
    Last edited by The Drone Ranger; 13-09-2011 at 04:39 PM.

  4. #24
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    To go back to the low mite numbers dropping after treatment. A comment was made by Willie Robson in his talk at the Conference in Perth that this year he was seeing low mite numbers in his colonies. This was the first time he had observed this but did not have an answer. This is from a commercial beekeeper who runs hundreds of colonies. Other hobby beekeepers are seeing the same low drops but others are still getting large drops after treatment. My money is on last years cold winter weather. Any other ideas?

  5. #25

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    Could be Jimbo lots more people are using Oxalic as a winter treatment now and very few are relying on the apistan strips
    Did he mention his treatment program ??

  6. #26
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    I think the combination of autumn treatments and OA might have more to do with it. I've not applied a winter OA treatment for the past two years and we're definitely starting to see the mite counts increasing. Yes Thymol knocks a good number of them down, but this year is the first that we've seen colonies showing signs that they aren't coping very well with the varroa.

    That pretty much knocks a lot of the sit back and see how they get on approach, from my point of view, on the head. The short answer is that they don't cope. The difference between the colonies in residence compared to the swarms that were all dosed with OA on arrival is pretty stark. I haven't completely discounted that we have a bunch of "won't treat" keepers on the allotment now as well which might account for some of the issues, but taking a longer term view I'm more inclined to point the finger at not using OA.

    From the point of view of leave them be and raise new colonies from survivors all the people I've seen have any success taking that approach have one thing in common, they all started with 100+ colonies and lost 95%+ of them to get to a stage where they had survivors to try and raise from and are in relative isolation so it's no surprise that people on the hobbyist end of the scale with 1-10 hives find they end up with none in a short space of time.

    I think you could take the approach, as I'm inclined to, that the colonies that have obviously struggled this year go into the 50% of colonies that I'll look to requeen (I'm using Roger Patterson/BIBBA's 50-50 scheme for now to determine which colonies I'll raise queens from). I'm not suggesting for a second that the rest are Varroa tolerant to much greater degree, but they haven't struggled as obviously as the others despite having the same IPM regime. I wouldn't raise queens from a colony that appeared susceptible to ChalkBrood so I don't see any real harm in not raising queens from colonies that appear to struggle with varroa despite treatment.

  7. #27
    Administrator gavin's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Jimbo View Post
    Any other ideas?
    1. Summer populations of bees high, stocks healthy, weather induced staying at home, boredom, might as well pick off the mites.

    Or (/and)

    2. Some unseen pathogen of Varroa sweeping the land, maybe a virus. (smaller fleas on fleas' backs idea)

    I do like guessing.

    Maybe ....

    3. Such a terrible year for queen mating, so lots of colonies had an extended brood-free period during which the mites died off or were kicked/dragged/carried out.

  8. #28
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    You're talking a deal of sense Nellie. One thing though, I know a beekeeper with about 20 colonies who has survivor stock that is doing quite well. He is in a relatively isolated area with feral colonies to keep him company and a few colonies kept by a few beekeepers. And what about Pete Haywood's experiences with Welsh beekeepers around him, as discussed on the Irish List?

    That feral colony enthusiasm you mentioned DL partly comes from the enthusiastic SB article writer seeing these apparently resistant bees for himself. It was naive of course (very) to try to encourage the spread of swarms through suburban Glasgow, but perhaps, in isolated areas where genetics can get to work, feral colonies help. It could be that they are less liable to collapse than colonies in apiaries and so are a better vehicle to increase the right genetics gradually. If there are lots of them. But you may just be selecting for swarminess and long broodless periods, not useful traits in managed bees.

  9. #29
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    Sure, do think that it's rather telling that queens from "tolerant" stock rarely seem to do well when taken out of their isolated apiaries and put in amongst the general population of bees. Whether that's tolerant bees or perhaps less virulent mites, who knows? There doesn't seem to be a lot of hard evidence about but I've seen enough reports from people who've had queens/nucs from "varroa tolerant bees" that aren't very tolerant when surrounded by other bee(keepers).

  10. #30

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    Nellie I'm with you on this.
    Les Bailey "Infectious Diseases of the Honey Bee" recognised hygienic behaviour exits but says that it is a recessionary trait.
    Difficult to breed in and ever so easy to lose again
    Buying queens for this trait --guaranteed lock in

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