Hurrah! My bees have varroa!

[oliver90owner]

MrB,

i re united them.

May I suggest you missed a trick early on? Small Q- colonies with no brood. An ideal time to zap the varroa. Also gives you a measure of infestation - in other words a check for your other colonies or a baseline for comparing mite drop checks.

Small colonies, dwindling, so no useful honey collection - well certainly no supers?

Dumping all the bees into icing sugar and running them back into the hive would have been an effective way to use the 'sugar dusting' mite removal technique.

The message is never let an opportunity slip by, to hammer the mites and get experience of the real infestation.

Regards, RAB

 

[Tom Bick]

Interesting John.

If this is so, why shouldn't we all put a piece of queen excluder across the entrances oif the hives and cull drone comb as much as possible? (assuming we are not wanting to have queens mated)...to keep the drones and varoa out?

Nice idea but

The cat is all ready out of the bag

You will trap all your own drones in your own hive

And people are starting to think that all the currant drone cull is resulting in fewer drones and a rise in queens not mating successfully.

 

[MrB]

Ignore!

 

[MrB]

MrB,

i re united them.

May I suggest you missed a trick early on? Small Q- colonies with no brood. An ideal time to zap the varroa. Also gives you a measure of infestation - in other words a check for your other colonies or a baseline for comparing mite drop checks.

Small colonies, dwindling, so no useful honey collection - well certainly no supers?

Dumping all the bees into icing sugar and running them back into the hive would have been an effective way to use the 'sugar dusting' mite removal technique.

The message is never let an opportunity slip by, to hammer the mites and get experience of the real infestation.

Regards, RAB

I take your point,
however, on monitoring the hive just before it became Q-, i had a zero mite count!

 

[RoofTops]

I had a zero mite count!

Trust me on this - you did have mites.

 

[MrB]

Trust me on this - you did have mites.

Thats why i said COUNT

 

[oliver90owner]

Every available means and opportunity, to assess mite numbers, needs to be used. Q- and low result for a few spoonfuls of icing sugar is better than £? on these proprietary remedies later...I hate paying out for something I don't need!

Regards, RAB