It’s August and time to perform mite control on our colonies. Over the summer the rates were really low, so we did not do any treatment. Though our colonies must to go strong into in the winer and now is when wintering bees are in larvae stage, and that’s where the mite infestation can happen, in capped brood.
So let’s do our mite test. We will follow the guide from https://honeybeehealthcoalition.org/, really great resource especially for new apiarists. Especially their Varroa Management PDF. Killing bees with alcohol method feels inhumane, thus we will use the sugar powder method:
- Scoop bees from brood frames into a wide mouth jar
- Cover the jar with a hardware cloth cut to fit into mason jar lid opening
- Add ~2 table spoons of powder sugar and shake the bees for a while to fully cover in powder
- Flip the jar and shake like a sault-shaker onto a clean white plate (easy to see mites on white)
- Consider adding more powder and repeating, but this time I did not see any new mites falling
- Sprinkle water onto the plate to dissolve the sugar powder and reveal hidden mites
- And here they are, tiny little monsters 🙂
You want mite control to show to show no more than 2 mites per 100 . In this hive we scopped a bit more than a cup of bees. One cup is ~600 bees. We probably had a bit more than that, but to be pessimistic we can use 600 as the number. And we counted 16 (!) mites. which gives us ~2.7%, not terribly bad, but already above the expected levels, and way more than in other hives, where we got none to ovne mite per same amount of bees. So we will treat this hive with Formic Pro immediately (Formic will penetrate capped brood, so we can save the bees which are going into the winter)
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