Queen Frame Trap for Varroa

[MuswellMetro]

having decided to try a biomechanical method of varroa control buy using a frame trap i find that £hornes want £57 for one....now at one per hive that is too expensive to contemplate

so anyone any plans or have built or even used the £hornes queen frame trap for varroa control?

i use hoffmans 14x12 on 28mm top bars ,so more complicated than i thought

it is not very good for the NBU pamphlet to suggest a queen frame trap, but not explain how made or what a QFT is, seems quite straight forward...tack an old plasrtci QE to bits of wood, until you try...clearances etc are the problen, especially with hoffmans

 

[sipa]

Think you will find one on Dave cushmans site

Quote from his site : Queen/brood isolation Various frame traps made of queen excluder material are produced by the appliance trade. In a normal hive, Varroa infested brood is split between 60% drone and 40% worker brood. By caging the queen on an empty drawn comb in a cage made of queen excluder material the mites can be 'drawn' to this frame as, after eight days, it will be the only one with open brood. After nine days this trapped brood is sealed and the frame is 'sacrificed' and another empty drawn comb placed with the queen in the trap. The second comb is sacrificed, again after 9 days, and a third frame is placed in the trap, if this is destroyed as well then we have no brood of any description left as after 24 days all other cells (worker or drone) will have emerged. The idea being that this isolated frame will have a disproportionate number of varroa infesting it and thus the destruction of it will harm the varroa more than the bees. It does disrupt brood development, but if it is timed for the back end of the main honey flow then will not reduce forager numbers and there is still time for a force of 'winter bees' to be raised. (There may even be a benefit in causing this to happen later than usual as the resulting winter bees will be slightly younger and thus have more life in spring.)

There are many variations to this method... one, two or three entrapments or one early in the season and one late. One, two or three combs per trap have been suggested and versions using drone comb or a mixture of drone/worker comb are also mentioned in literature.

could you adapt this : dave-cushman.net/bee/droneframe.html

 

[alanf]

having decided to try a biomechanical method of varroa control buy using a frame trap i find that £hornes want £57 for one....now at one per hive that is too expensive to contemplate

As it happens I was looking up frame traps too . The price prompted me to think about how I could make one. Not sure if I'd want more than one initially. Frame trapping for varroa leaves a big gap in the production of young bees and has a lot of resources going into rearing them. In less than ideal weather you could find you have a poor population age profile and few stores that could be hard to recover from. They do have other uses though, producing larvae of a known age for queen rearing for one.

As far as using a frame trap goes, whatever you're using it for, the idea is to restrict egg laying to one known frame. It has to fit in your hive, but does it have to be full height? I don't know the spacing in the product as sold but I'd have thought it would take up a greater width than a standard frame. Dave Cushman's drone frames in his diagrams (referenced by @sipa, thanks) are 22+13mm each side or 48mm total width. You might have to remove the dummy board or a frame from the box to fit it in so you're already shuffling frames. And you're inserting an empty drawn frame, so maybe not one already in the brood box. How much is it really a disadvantage to use a frame that is not your normal brood dimensions? A parallel sided frame such as SN1 or DN1 would be a lot simpler to work with. You could even try drawing some drone cell foundation in a super frame, then move that below to trap varroa in.

I saw Th0rnes were selling bare wire queen excluders (and plastic types) in the shop sales, might well be in the January sale too. Pin batten spacers over the frame and hold a section of QX in place with rubber bands, hard to think of a simpler frame trap. The bands would hold for a day or two but you could reinforce with garden wire if it was in the hive for a week. If you wanted to make a frame trap that you could insert your standard frames into there's the Dave Cushman drone frame type, sandwiching your frame between two QX faced spacer frames. Or you could lower the frame into a QX box with thin sides and a hinged top. Potentially thin sheet metal and soldering QX wire sections, bending a steel sheet QX or heat welding/bending a plastic QX could be worth trying.

 

[drstitson]

a cheap alternative is to have an eke into which one can mount a frame (with queen) horizontally (or near horizonally) - you just put QE below and crownboard on top.

eg.

http://img.overpic.net/images/8/y/p/x8yplcdi6zoxkaup7pv.jpg

or

http://apicoltoregiacomo.beepworld.it/files/dscn5073.jpg

 

[MuswellMetro]

a cheap alternative is to have an eke into which one can mount a frame (with queen) horizontally (or near horizonally) - you just put QE below and crownboard on top.

eg.

http://img.overpic.net/images/8/y/p/x8yplcdi6zoxkaup7pv.jpg

or

http://apicoltoregiacomo.beepworld.it/files/dscn5073.jpg

Dear Doctor S, thast's is interesting, if you see my alternative thread, i think that i am going to use a drawn super dummied down to three or four frames with QE either side

on Alanf comments, i was think of running a dirty hive rather than destroy the infected brood....adding the varroa infected brood then being able to treat the hivewith a varroacide BUT dont extract the honey...use it for winterstores and the bees from the dirty hive as bees (clean) to combine with other hives but like you i am a bit phased by the loss of young bees

but you are right on the DN1 frame "KISS" works well as you describe it....on a another note had to go Pinner to the fed meeting tonight as holidayr relief , nice people but rather an uninspiring meeting

 

[alanf]

i was think of running a dirty hive rather than destroy the infected brood....adding the varroa infected brood then being able to treat the hivewith a varroacide BUT dont extract the honey...

Just a few thought exercises about a 'dirty' hive. I assume you're culling any drone and trying to preserve the workers?

There might be a few negatives you would want to consider too. Varroa are not the only disease you might be spreading between hives by moving brood. Rather than mixing hives would a 'dirty' nuc be an alternative? With no laying queen, there's an opportunity to treat with oxalic when the brood emerges and return the young bees to the parent hive after treatment. Without many foragers you wouldn't worry about tainted honey, rather they would need stores or feeding.

I recall reading that varroa damaged brood remain unhealthy as adults, even if not carrying phoretic mites and emerging varroa will feed on older nursery bees. A weakened hive population even if some brood initially emerge uninfected and virus free. The benefit of trying to 'clean' your batch of brood is going to depend on how much brood gets through the treatments to be uninfected and undamaged adults. There is also the presumption that you know what the varroa infection rate is before you start. Practically, if you knew your parent hive infection rate was high, the trapped brood might not be healthy enough to be worth preserving. While if you knew the infection rate was low, why would you start trapping? How wide is a range of infestation levels that both make trapping worthwhile and leave a quantity of workers worth cleaning after treatment?

I wouldn't try to discourage experiments that could lead to useful tactics. What you might be looking for is some measurable way of showing that all your effort was actually having beneficial results.

 

[Black Comb]

Good thread MM.
I don't see the point of a dirty hive.
As Alan says brood affected by varroa are damaged for life.
At a talk at the honey show by Dr Bowman from Aberdeen Uni. he stated that his research had revealed that when a varroa mite bites through the cuticle of the larva/pupa it surrounds the hole with an anti-coagulant and the hole remains open for the life of the bee. He doubts whether varroa can bite through the cuticle of adult bees but rather use this hole for feeding. When you see 2 mites on an adult they are using the same feed hole.

 

[alanf]

At a talk at the honey show by Dr Bowman from Aberdeen Uni.

Ah, I had an image of that in my mind but couldn't remember exactly where I'd seen the pictures. Thanks for reminder .

 

[drstitson]

i'd imagine that a dirty hive with just act as a sink to collect and amplify viruses - increasing risk to other colonies through drift.

 

[MuswellMetro]

ok point taken as to whether worthwhile if infected

i might just rely on ASs to reduce the summer varroa load....still might create a longer brood break on the parent side as i want to change the strain of Queens to local bred ones...if we ever get the BKA breeding program off the ground

i did not have this dilemma in the 70's when i help my Grandfather...it was only AFB we were concerned about,

little or no EFB around
No varroa
Glorious hedgerow Honey
No 100 hectare OSR fields

and a 1lb bag of granulated sugar in february was all they got fed

 

[beebreeder]

you could always do like the lady on iwf.de does and put an empty frame in and when it is full of sealed drone brood cut it out and replace , the bees will do it all over again

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKTvp1lupHY&feature=related
4.50 minutes on

 

[Skyhook]

I've read about frame trapping. It sounds an incredible amount of faff: and given the huge loss of brood, it's hard to think what methods of control it's better than,other than icing sugar dusting or prayer.

 

[ebee]

I must say, Dr Stitson, that I had not considered a horizontal frame as a queen trap. Does the queen lay both sides with the frame oriented that way?

 

[Skyhook]

I've read about frame trapping. It sounds an incredible amount of faff: and given the huge loss of brood, it's hard to think what methods of control it's better than,other than icing sugar dusting or prayer.

I may have to eat my words. I went to a talk last night by Ian Homer, who I believe is a former BBKA education officer, and semed to have his head screwed on. He reckoned frame trapping was an unparallelled form of control in terms of numbers- his view was that you could achieve about 97% control if carried out fully, whereas any other forms would realistically struggle to get above 70% at best. He agreed that the loss of bees would mean a loss of honey- but it certainly demonstrates an 'up' side to the method!

.

 

[drstitson]

"He agreed that the loss of bees would mean a loss of honey"

but does it? depends where in UK you are. brood removal should be completed before august when winter bee rearing begins - doing it later has serious consequences. bees raised in mid-late july will be foraging mid august on - when most of us remove supers and treat for varroa anyway. presumably problems are for those hitting the heather.

"Does the queen lay both sides with the frame oriented that way?"

AFAIK yes - but will check with the author of this site: http://www.apicolturangrisani.it/tecnica-apistica/652-blocco-di-covata-con-favo-orizzontale.html

 

[DanBee]

e reckoned frame trapping was an unparallelled form of control in terms of numbers- his view was that you could achieve about 97% control if carried out fully, whereas any other forms would realistically struggle to get above 70% at best.

I looked into this in some depth last year. As I recall the ~97% success rate was via shook swarm followed by queen trapping of at least 3 cycles. Shook swarm retains the ~30% mobile mites, which do not subsequently immediately dive for brood. Queen trapping is effective when the trapped brood is the only brood present - otherwise you're wasting the first 3 weeks of operation as the surrounding brood develops.

Queen trapping is a bit of a faff, but can coexist successfully with 9-day inspection cycles and once you've found the queen the first time, she really shouldn't be that hard to transfer from one trapped frame to the next

Just bear in mind this ~97% control comes at the expense of all the brood for a minimum of three weeks.

 

[MuswellMetro]

I may have to eat my words. I went to a talk last night by Ian Homer, who I believe is a former BBKA education officer, and semed to have his head screwed on. He reckoned frame trapping was an unparallelled form of control in terms of numbers- his view was that you could achieve about 97% control if carried out fully, whereas any other forms would realistically struggle to get above 70% at best. He agreed that the loss of bees would mean a loss of honey- but it certainly demonstrates an 'up' side to the method!

.

you now know what made me to start the thread ....same lecture just earlier in the month, i did not like his version of an AS swarm control onto only foundation and QE under

 

[Hivemaker.]

Just bear in mind this ~97% control comes at the expense of all the brood for a minimum of three weeks.

Which could if done at certain times possibly result in a reduction of around 40,000 new bees, and a rapidly diminishing older work force, which has then to revert to brood rearing as there are no young nurse bees left.

 

[MuswellMetro]

"He agreed that the loss of bees would mean a loss of honey"

but does it? depends where in UK you are. brood removal should be completed before august when winter bee rearing begins - doing it later has serious consequences. bees raised in mid-late july will be foraging mid august on - when most of us remove supers and treat for varroa anyway. presumably problems are for those hitting the heather.

"Does the queen lay both sides with the frame oriented that way?"

AFAIK yes - but will check with the author of this site: http://www.apicolturangrisani.it/tecnica-apistica/652-blocco-di-covata-con-favo-orizzontale.html

would the downward facing cells make the bees draw out Queen cells

 

[drstitson]

presume not. giving them downward facing cells to start queen cells helps but they do what they feel is needed NOT what the cells say.