treatment against the varroa mite help

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wightbees

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My hive was last treated against varroa in Autumn. (Apiguard)
What steps do you think i should now take against these mites ?
Thanks for any advice.
 
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Do you know you have mites? Have you put a board in for 24 hours and counted the mite drop? Alternatively, run an uncapping fork through a patch of drone brood and extract 20 pupae - if more than 1 mite in 20 pupae, you have a problem and need to treat.

See here:

http://www.dave-cushman.net/bee/varroadetect.html
 
Depends...

If you get an idea of what your current mite drop is, you can estimate what the current level is. Stick the floor in for a week, count the mites. Go to https://secure.fera.defra.gov.uk/beebase/public/BeeDiseases/varroaCalculator.cfm and stick in the information, that will give you an indication as to the current mite levels in the colony and whether you should be panicing yet.

If you don't have supers on you can treat with apiguard again, but as a 2-6week treatment it might not be practical at this time of year.

You can stick a Super frame in the brood box, the bees should draw drone comb on the bottom, when this is sealed, this can be cut out taking a good number of the mites with it. Run an uncapping fork over it to get the larvae out and see how many you're getting, these numbers can again be run through the calculator above.

You can also just uncap areas of drone brood in normal frames to get the larvae/varroa out and count that way.

And you can also dust with Icing sugar at the end of inspections. There appears to be some debate as to how effective this is with opions going from "not at all" to "quite" and everything in between. Everyone seems to have their favourite method of application but I just take a standard British handful and apply swift forward momentum in the direction of the top bars and then push anything on top into the colony. The theory behind this is that the icing sugar does two things, first it encourages the bees to groom and second, it coats the (sticky) feet of the varroa mite and makes it harder for it to hang on to the bees.
 
How do you know you have varroa in your hive?

Put in your varroa board and monitor your mite drop over a few days. If no varroa drop then no need to treat.

A small mite drop could be treated by dusting with icing sugar next time you do an inspection.

A heavy drop and you will be into a Formic acid treatment and/or drone brood removal.

Small drop - up to 8 varroa a day
Heavydrop - more than 15 varroa a day

Nellie and RAE beet me to the reply !!
 
The hive has a solid floor , as i have just got it i am in the process of moving the bees from one hive to another with OMF.
I will not be taken any honey from this hive as all i want to do is exspand and hopefully
split the hive latter this year.
Don't the icing sugar make everything sticky? worth ago though.
 
The hive has a solid floor , as i have just got it i am in the process of moving the bees from one hive to another with OMF.
I will not be taken any honey from this hive as all i want to do is exspand and hopefully
split the hive latter this year.
Don't the icing sugar make everything sticky? worth ago though.

No, icing sugar is fine. Dust it over them with a kitchen sieve, they get annoyed, but start to groom it off. You will see white "ghost bees" flying for a while.
 
If you've got plenty of drone brood, uncap a couple of forkfulls to get a count.

If you're not intending to super then you can just treat with apiguard. If you've put supers on, even just to give more room then I wouldn't use apiguard.

As long as it's dry then iciing sugar is fine, you'll get "ghost bees" flying around but the bees basically clean everything up before it gets a change to get sticky.
 
Ok thanks for the replys
I will give them some icing sugar this coming monday.
 
Thanks MM

I might order some , anyone else tried it?
 
Hi Wightbees

I have used hiveclean with really good results in lieu of oxalic at Xmas.
Definately worth a imo.

Cazza
 
Ok i will try some thanks :)
 

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