Curbstone Valley has two fantastic posts about varroa monitoring and management. As always, they have two brilliant posts that goes in depth and is easily understood. So instead of rehashing all of their info, I’ll just go over our bee update and how we are dealing with varroa.
When doing our inspection we were pleasantly surprised to see our colony only had one frame not built up completely in both deep supers. They were very strong in numbers so we knew we had a good queen. There was some nice brood frames as well. You can see the larvae in the uncapped cells.
Not only were there lots of brood, but they were now producing full frames of honey in the lower box. This also meant that it was time to increase the size of the hive. With only one frame left not fully completed, we needed to give them more space so they wouldn’t feel the need to swarm. We were also getting ready for the summer bloom so they needed as much room as they could get.
But this inspection wasn’t just to check how the colony was thriving. We needed to do a varroa mite check. Our hive came with a screened bottom board and a sticky board that slides under the screen. Our board has lines and numbers on it, which makes it infinitely easier to make varroa counts. We cleaned off the board and then sprayed it with cooking oil. The oil traps the varroa that fall through so they can’t scamper away. We decided to use powdered sugar on our hive to facilitate the mite drop. We simply dusted the tops of the frames on each super and then using a bee brush, brushed it across the top so it fell through, dusting the bees. The powdered sugar does two things. It causes the mites to loose their grip on the bees and it also stimulates the bees into grooming themselves, which dislodges more mites. As an added bonus, it also feeds them.
After we dusted the hive, we put on a queen excluder on the top deep super and then added our honey super. This helps keep the queen from laying eggs in the honey super. I don’t know about you, but I’m not particularly excited about having larvae in my honey.
This is our hive right now. With the way things are going right now, I’m planning on picking up another honey super very soon to have on hand.
After 24 hours (you can do 48 and 72 hours and then divide by the number of days to get the 24 hour count) we pulled out our sticky board, brought it in the house and sat down to do the count. The mites were pretty easy to find. They are a dark red and have these tiny legs sticking out on one side. Our count was a respectable 13 mites in 24 hours. So we had varroa. Really, there’s no way to avoid it, but we needed to take action and use integrated pest management (IPM) to keep the numbers low.
Our first line of defense was, of course, the powdered sugar. We’ll regularly dust the bees to help keep the mites off of them. It’s said that dusting with powdered sugar can help reduce the mite load by 25%. While that doesn’t seem like much, it does add up over time. Our second line of defense is using drone frames to trap the mites. Mites prefer drone brood because they are larger and spend more time in the capped cells giving mites the chance to reproduce more. Our drone frames are bright green to make them easy to find.
We put the frames in 2 weeks ago and crossed our fingers. We checked the hive yesterday to find the comb on the frames built and eggs in the comb….I think. I think I saw eggs, but to be honest, it’s REALLY hard to see anything through the veil and white against fluorescent green isn’t a very good contrast. In two weeks we’ll check the hive again and probably pull the comb to see what the mite load is.
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We feel lucky to have lots of honeybees coming to your garden. I'm not sure of their starting point. For a couple years the number was definitely down though the less social species increased their numbers.
nellie
My mom just brought be back thyme honey from Turkey. As you can imagine, it's basically honey from bees that feed off thyme blossoms, and the honey has a very deep earthy flavor with a note of thyme. Anyway, I thought maybe this could be done in a closed system by trapping the bees in a large greenhouse kinda thing and providing them with a mixture of simple syrup infused with thyme. It would be an interesting experiment. Oh, and Obama is a fascist who is controlling our minds by pouring flouride in the drinking water, thus softening our cerebral cortex, just like Hitler did!*
PS, Rachel, that last bit was something someone actually told me seriously once.
Thanks for the shout out Rachel
Looks like things are going along well! We couldn't get those stylish Pierco frames for our medium hive bodies, as they only make them for deeps. You certainly can't miss them in the hive though! We're actually going excluder-less, at least this season, but after a bit of a bumpy start on food reserves, and an impending dearth in the fall, I doubt we'd be able to take honey this year. We've heard a lot lately about bees not always wanting to cross the excluder, and despite an empty hive body in position, they become honey-bound and swarm anyway. Some seemed to have more success by moving up a frame of honey into the new box, or misting the foundation with sugar water, so next year if we use them, we might try that. We've even had a little trouble getting them to move up without the excluder in recent weeks, unless we move honey frames up. Good luck on the drone brood check!
CVF, I totally should have mentioned that they are building out the honey super already and some of the frames are already halfway filled with honey, which is why I'm thinking we need to start thinking about getting another super.