(Category: Our bees)
Posted by David
Saturday 23 January 2010 - 22:54:24
We walked up the garden to take the air and look at the bees and I idly suggested that we should check the varroa count. I slid out one of the trays and immediately decided we had to count, as I could see a lot of varroa. It was about 4 weeks ago that we treated the garden apiary with oxalic acid, surely the count should be zero. I got a notepad and the magnifying glass and was quite shocked at the results. It's ten days since we last counted - the floors have been in during that time - and all the results were about the same daily rate as last time or greater! Some colonies are giving a daily average higher than before the treatment.
What is going on? There was a big drop after treatment. Are we still seeing some effect, perhaps because of the bees clustering in the cold weather? I have searched the net for info and did find one piece of research that had a surge of mite drop 2 weeks after the treatment, but mostly the effect trails off because there are no mites left! Did we not do it well enough? Was the product we bought too old? Have our bees been so strong that there are huge numbers of varroa? The Apiguard didn't seem to do the job this year either. And we have managed the colonies with shook and artificial swarms and some drone culling. We didn't sugar them as much as we would have liked because the humidity has been so great for so much of the year: could that be a key element that we are now paying for missing?
I have put the trays back in. I would like to think that when we check again they will show much better results, but I fear they will not.
This news item is from Beesmith
( http://www.beesmith.co.uk/news.php?extend.233 )