thymol result???

[greengumbo]

Darren (and others) -- while the bodycount may be impressive, what matters most is the level of the residual problem after treatment.


I'd suggest checking for (at least) a few days about a fortnight after finishing treatment.

One school of thought is that, after interfering with varroa's population dynamics (as with a brood break), you need to monitor (and average) over at least 14 days to get a true measure of the new population - because the varroa's age distribution will not be typical of a 'natural' population.

Hi ITMA, I stopped treating after 9 days of Api life var due to introducing my new queen. I cleared off the impressive drop from the board and then put it back in. This was four days ago and there still seems to be a lot of mites dropping, much more than pre-treatment - could this be residual effects from the treatment ?

I am going to start the treatment again in a few weeks after new queen has started laying up and settled.

 

[itma]

Hi ITMA, I stopped treating after 9 days of Api life var due to introducing my new queen. ... This was four days ago and there still seems to be a lot of mites dropping, much more than pre-treatment - could this be residual effects from the treatment ?

I am going to start the treatment again in a few weeks after new queen has started laying up and settled.

You've interrupted treatment. Yes, I'd expect to see higher than usual mite mortality for up to maybe a couple of weeks.


Beware the temperature, later in the year. These things need warmth to vaporise the Thymol, to be properly effective. They don't work very well in the cold!
I don't know what part of Aberdeenshire you might be in - altitude probably matters greatly. Saw that Braemar hit -2C the other night ...

If you've missed the weather window, consider a different treatment rather than just pressing on bravely!

 

[Teemore]

I'm going to say that I think you may have cause and effect the wrong way round.

isn't it more likely that it didn't swarm because it wasn't as vigorous as the others, and that the lack of vigour was, in turn, down to varroa?


// And anyway, on swarming, its the departing swarm that is largely varroa-free (only a few phoretic mites), and the vast majority of the varroa are left behind in the 'parent' hive, albeit then suffering a brood break.

No, the colony is vigorous. It is headed by a 2010 queen, they are on double brood and two shallow supers have been taken off already. I nadir'd with a second BB when I detected the colony beginning to reduce down the neck of existing play cells; at that stage they were on 11.5 full frames of brood and at its peak the colony was on 16 full frames of brood (It is lovely to see a national frame laid up from top to bottom and from side to side). Currently the colony is back filling the second brood box with honey and brood rearing is moving down into the bottom brood box. They over wintered on a single national brood box last winter and so I am in the process of reducing them down to a single national BB. As an aside, I am trialling a couple of 14x12s at present.....

You mention brood breaks and they are a key part of reducing the varroa load. I concur that the "swarm" probably has the biggest benefit but my understanding is that swarming or the creation of a nuc or nucs from a "parent" colony and the resultant brood breaks and depletion of older bees in the colony reduces the varroa levels in the parent colony and in the swarm/nuc(s).

I think I have a research paper somewhere that specifcally considered the effect of creating Nucs on varroa population size. Must look it up again to refresh my memory when I get the time...