New Year checks
Varroa checks first in the garden following the oxalic acid treatment. Well they are certainly reducing but the treatment may still be effective. Now I'm not sure how instant oxalic is meant to be? Hive 1 is down to 8 a day, hive 2 is 22, 3 is 5, 4 is still high at 47. and 5 is 55. So, moving in the right direction but not out of the woods yet.
We then visited all of our other hives.
All looks good at the Rectory. We had a zero score for varroa drop which is encouraging but there seems to be little activitity in the nest as there was not much debris on any of the boards. Boards have been left in to check again.
Then on to Green Lane. Only hive 1 has a varroa board which we replaced after checking. It's got a drop of 2 a day and judging by the debris on the board, they seem quite active and there are probably 7 seams of bees. They seem OK for stores too.
At Little Piece we found a drop of 1 a day on hive 1, 4 a day on hive 2, 2 a day on hive 3, zero at hive 4 (although less activity in the nest), zero on hive 5 and 1 a day in the nuc. We left the boards in to do another count. They all seem about OK for stores but the nuc is quite light. We will want to keep an eye on them though in case we need to add fondant.
And for completeness, we took at look at the hive on The Hill. The sun had come out by the time we got there and the bees were flying and we estimated about 4 seams of bees from the debris on the board. We counted 150 varroa but that is over two and a bit months so we've replaced the board to do another count when we can.
Posted by Sally on Friday 01 January 2010 - 22:02:41 |
