Check those mites! A word of warning

[Erichalfbee]

As the title. Checking two colonies that had sufficient brood break for me to think the mite load would be low( one wasn't) I thought I'd just do a one or two day count on the ones that were given MAQS in July and to my horror the then small colony that got just the one strip had a count of 30! According to the NBU calculator that's 1500 mites!!! Most of the little b*****s were still alive. On with the apilife better late than never but I should have been on the ball earlier

 

[TOBY-3652]

30 i have just done a week on one of mine and it has dropped 2700 this is with appiguard.. I knew it was gonna be high but??? 3 weeks to go.. Some of mine have not dropped a lot a couple are very high. These were the ones that i never had 2 artificial swarm this year..

 

[madasafish]

My drops pre treatment were low - 7 -14 a week.

During treatment , my largest hive dropped most mites (as you might expect) - about 300 over 4 weeks..
Other hives drops ranged from 10-100 over the same period..

 

[Teemore]

I haven't been on the forum for a day or three but would echo the words of warning. I was conscious that many colonies had heavy varroa loads as I was beginning to see phoretic mites on workers and in a few instances, perforated cappings.
Just prior to treating, I took samples from a few apiaries and calculated that infestation varied from between 4% to 40%....
After treating with ApiLife var I have seen the heaviest mite falls since I started beekeeping and I am quite sure that slugs and earwigs etc. have been having a field day feasting on some of the dead mites on the inspection trays so there is no point trying to count the wee beasties.
I note that the mite fall has been heaviest in those colonies which did not attempt to swarm this past season (about half my colonies)