🐝💗Our Backyard Beekeeping Journey!💗🐝

[cavemanrich]

300 or 1/2 cup of bees is whats needed to do a mite test/count. I do 3 to 5 tests per hive per year. OAV treatments do little harm to bees unless a bee gets too close to the vaporizer.
A queen lays 1500 to 2000 eggs a day. During the peak of the season it can get up to 3000 eggs. So a few mite washes a year are insignificant. More are lost each day do to natural causes, mostly foraging.

That explains it quite well. Sacrificing ½cup to save a gallon makes sense.
Wondering if there will be a better way to mite control in the future.
Still another question. Is there a process to protect the queen during the treatment???

 

[drstratton]

That explains it quite well. Sacrificing ½cup to save a gallon makes sense.
Wondering if there will be a better way to mite control in the future.
Still another question. Is there a process to protect the queen during the treatment???

That's a good question.
The treatment I'm using right now brings very little chance of harm to the queen. Some of the chemical treatments are much riskier for her. Formic Pro is also a natural acid, but it's very temperature specific and while it kills a lot of mites, it can also cause a lot of harm to the bees. I guess you could pull her out, but that's not really a good thing to do. They could reject and kill her when you try to reintroduce her. I'm sure others here can share more than what I know.
I'm really hoping that using a regimen of OAV, OAE and drone frames will be enough to keep down the mite load and thereby keep our bees healthy. That being said my husband is still thinking about using apiguard if we're still finding mites.

 

[R2elk]

That's a good question.
The treatment I'm using right now brings very little chance of harm to the queen. Some of the chemical treatments are much riskier for her. Formic Pro is also a natural acid, but it's very temperature specific and while it kills a lot of mites, it can also cause a lot of harm to the bees. I guess you could pull her out, but that's not really a good thing to do. They could reject and kill her when you try to reintroduce her. I'm sure others here can share more than what I know.
I'm really hoping that using a regimen of OAV, OAE and drone frames will be enough to keep down the mite load and thereby keep our bees healthy. That being said my husband is still thinking about using apiguard if we're still finding mites.

As long as you are in an area where there are other bees, you will always have some mites.

 

[drstratton]

That explains it quite well. Sacrificing ½cup to save a gallon makes sense.
Wondering if there will be a better way to mite control in the future.
Still another question. Is there a process to protect the queen during the treatment???

Another line of thought is just like antibiotics, mites develop resistance to the chemical treatments. We want the bees to become resistant to the mites. These mites come from Asia and they are not experiencing the same rate of devastation bees in the US are experiencing. In my opinion, that's because those bees know how to deal with the mites.

 

[drstratton]

As long as you are in an area where there are other bees, you will always have some mites.

Agreed. So, we have to keep treating.

 

[cavemanrich]

These mites come from Asia and they are not experiencing the same rate of devastation bees in the US are experiencing. I'm my opinion, that's because those bees know how to deal with the mites.

More questions;
Would it be a good idea to bring some of those species here to US, or leave well enough alone??
I know about those Killer Bees,, as a bad invasion.

 

[drstratton]

More questions;
Would it be a good idea to bring some of those species here to US, or leave well enough alone??
I know about those Killer Bees,, as a bad invasion.

I don't really know the answer to that. Honeybees are supposedly not native to the US. They come from Europe. People are trying to breed bees with the hygienic traits for mite control, ie... they can sense when something is wrong in capped cells and clean it out to remove the threat. I think there has been quite a bit of progress along those lines. So, some of those bees might have already been introduced. The bees need to learn to fend for themselves, but until that time, we need to help them. I'm not far along enough in my learning to know how to raise hygienic bees, but it's one of the things I want to know. We might always need to intervene on their behalf. I for one want to learn how to do it naturally, as I believe that is how they learn to become aware of the mites. But, I don't want to be so stubborn about that, that I lose my bees.

 

[R2elk]

Would it be a good idea to bring some of those species here to US

This has already been done.

As @drstratton said there has been much done about breeding hygienic bees.

Off the top of my head there is the Minnesota hygienic line. There are a number of Russian lines.

Another one that I purchased this spring is Randy Oliver's Golden West line.

 

[drstratton]

This has already been done.

As @drstratton said there has been much done about breeding hygienic bees.

Off the top of my head there is the Minnesota hygienic line. There are a number of Russian lines.

Another one that I purchased this spring is Randy Oliver's Golden West line.

I would like to buy a hygienic queen next year. Did you have to order Randy Oliver's online?

 

[R2elk]

I would like to buy a hygienic queen next year. Did you have to order Randy Oliver's online?

Yes. I ordered them through Olivarez Honey Bees, Inc.

They are advertised as being very gentle. So far they are out performing my other 2 hives. The Olivarez Italians are not far behind though.