Mite Count

I put a couple of home made sticky boards (Correx board and Vaseline) under the OMF (Open Mesh Floors, or Screened Bottom Boards for my US friends) on Friday afternoon and pulled them on Monday afternoon i.e. 3 day counts.

Now here's the interesting bit...

The swarm hive I caught last year and combined with another swarm a few weeks ago had a 3-day count of 133.  I noticed several bees with DWV in this hive so was expecting some mites and a daily count of about 45 is a bit high. The following link is quite useful.

National Bee Unit - Varroa Calculator

The older established hive (that Dave has never treated or done anything with - EVER) had a 3-day count of just 13.  Wow!  There's something in this hive!   Bees with good strong genetic traits perhaps?  I know Dave thought of them as aggressive and I have heard anecdotal reports that aggressive bees (particularly Africanised bees) have greater resistance to Varroa.  Well these bees aren't Africanised, but I can hope their behavior promotes some good mite control!  I can but hope.

So what to do?  Well I have some MAQS I can use to treat, but the weather looks a bit on the chill side for treating over the next couple of days.  So I may just wait until Thursday and then treat just the swarm hive.  The other I will leave alone.

If I am unlucky with the MAQS (I have lost queens in the past, but then the treatment was done in some very hot weather) I can think of worse things to do than take a frame of eggs and larvae from the established hive and pop this in the swarm hive!  With luck I'll get their good genes passed on.

STOP PRESS:  I added MAQS to the swarm hive on Wednesday evening.  It wasn't too cold and the next few days seem to be good in respect of day time temperatures.  I wanted to treat sooner rather than later.