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.

Mite Treatment Continues.

That's it! It's the last week of July and the first round (and I hope only round) of treatment is now underway on all my hives.

The Botanical Garden hives have "Mite Away Quick Strip" on them. The Ladue Hives, as they all had mite counts <30, have no treatment. Diane's hive has MAQS and in my own back yard one hive has no treatment (it had a count of 27) and in the other hive I managed to cage the queen.

So I have lots of things to consider once the treatment period is over.  I plan to do another count, most likely at the end of August. Then I'll decide if I need to do anything more before the winter.

Interestingly, all of the new season hives needed no treatment but the ones that came through the winter were in need of a lot of attention.  Doubtless this means early season treatment is the most efficacious thing to do. So I think I will try to treat all my hives in late March or April next year. I'll have to see whether I think caging the queen or using MAQS is more effective. 

I am due to start pulling the first treatments on August 1st, and the other MAQS on August 4th. I'm going to cage the Carniolan Queen for 10 days. Watch this space for news!

Mite Treatment Begins

I missed the first day of cool weather but it looks like we have some settled cool days for a week so; I can but hope I suppose!

Anyway, I just put on some "Mite Away Quick Strips" on the two hives at the Botanical Gardens. I'll remove them in a week or so and then do another mite count just to see how effective the treatment was. Oh, and also to check on how they effected the Queens!

Some other good news; both hives have filled the supers I left on them after the harvest so in a week I'd better bring another couple of empty supers back!