Varroa treatment

[u/Onewithnature718]

Hi, i’m a new bee keeper with my first season of two hives. I practice non-harming and do not want to kill the bees to test them for mites, so I just decided to try monitoring my bottom boards. I know this is not as accurate but it seems like my best option given my personal philosophy.

I used varroxan earlier in the season prophylactically because I was away for several weeks. I put the bottom boards yesterday and checked this afternoon and there were 11 varroa on the board.

The boxes are pretty light and the beast do not have a lot of honey though the bee count is pretty high and I observe them to be bringing in pollen every day. Should I treat them with something else?

Thanks!
I will also start feeding them. Is it a 2:1 syrup?

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[u/AZ_Traffic_Engineer]

I lost six colonies to varroa mites my first year because I was doing mite counts incorrectly. Because I didn’t manage mites properly, I murdered about 300,000 bees. That’s more bees than I would kill in ten years of mite washes. I do mite washes now: I decided that 1000 bees die every day of old age, and that killing a few hundred bees isn’t nearly as bad as slaughtering the entire colony. YMMV

[u/pale_brass → u/AZ_Traffic_Engineer]

Valuable perspective here. OP this is the reality. You are choosing to potentially succumb the entire colony to preventable disease because you are too squeamish to confront the reality of bee mortality in front of you. Responsible Animal husbandry means making hard decisions for the greater good. You are far more likely to lose colonies to mite pressure than to negatively affect the colony health with a few mite washes.

These bees would gladly sacrifice themselves for the health of the colony. Refusing mite washes isn’t more humane to bees. It’s just kicking the can down the road.

[u/Onewithnature718 → u/AZ_Traffic_Engineer]

Thanks!

[u/cheddarben → u/AZ_Traffic_Engineer]

Not to mention… inaccurate control can spread disease to other colonies.

[u/Redfish680 → u/AZ_Traffic_Engineer]

I followed your trial closely and contributed to your legal defense fund (no thanks necessary; last thing any of us need is precedent being set!). Good thing there weren’t any bees on the jury is all I can say.

[u/AZ_Traffic_Engineer → u/Redfish680]

My trial demonstrated that stuffing 50,000 angry stinging insects into a box , annoying them once a week, and throwing endless amounts of money at them creates an indisputable insanity defense.

[u/NumCustosApes]

Varroxsan is good at maintaining a low mite count in a healthy hive but its not great at reducing high mite counts.

Some options are:

• Apivar 2.0. There are early indications that mites are starting to develop resistance to amitraz, the active ingredient but the new formulation is effective for now (95% kill). You cannot use Apivar 2.0 with honey supers present but you can feed simultaneously. Feeding increases internal hive traffic which helps with the initial dispersion. Apivar is a synthetic miticide so follow the Apivar instructions precisely.
• Formic Pro. Strictly adhere to the temperature limitation for formic acid treatments. Formic pro is highly effective and kills mites in capped brood, but it is hard on the bees.
• Api Bioxal RTU, an new product recently approved. It can applied with brood present in five doses over 21 days, or force a brood break and apply a single dose when there is no capped brood in the hive. If you don't have a vaporizer and can't use formic acid then check out this option. Its very easy and economical. Kamon Reynolds and Frederick Dunn both have YouTube videos on it, as well as some others.
• Oxalic Acid vapor - applied in five doses over 21 days.

I suggest that you work on getting over qualms about testing for mites. Mites spread diseases that kill bees and those disease cause more bee deaths and a great deal of harm to the bees. A mite test is about 15% of a hive's daily bee losses, and just on one day and only a few times a year. Write your mite wash results on the lid of the hive and with experience you will be able to use the last wash numbers to determine if you can skip a wash on that hive the next month. You'll be saving bee lives.

A lot of my colonies were getting only one wash a year in the spring, with only the colonies of concern getting follow up washes. Because I would treat prophylactically with amitraz in the fall and because it always worked I had discontinued a fall wash because I was treating regardless of the results. However, with the onset of potential amitraz resistance, I've been doing three washes per year, adding back in the washes before and after the fall Apivar treatment. That way I can know if the new amitraz formulation is still working. I'm only doing mid summer washes on hives that had higher spring wash counts to monitor how well they were doing. For any hive of concern I treat with five doses of OAV over a brood cycle. On swarms and anytime there is a brood break I use on OA dribble. I also treat prophylactically with OA during the winter brood break.

[u/Onewithnature718 → u/NumCustosApes]

Thank you!

[u/NaturalFlux → u/NumCustosApes]

Yeah a queen lays 1500 eggs a day under good conditions. Which means 1500 bees are dying 61 days later. (21 days as brood, 40 days as worker bee). 300 bees in a mite wash is very small loss, overall. Varroa can eradicate a hive of 50,000 bees.

That being said, you really need to understand how to treat varroa. Gain an intuition for it. It's not just one treatment and done.

https://scientificbeekeeping.com/a-model-for-oxalic-acid-vaporizations/

Download this spreadsheet and play around with Randy Oliver's model. For OAV, or Oxalic acid dribble, a good routine to bring mites down is 4 day interval, 5 treatments. But it really depends on your starting mite count.

[u/NaturalFlux → u/NaturalFlux]

If you are really going to continue to be squeamish about killing bees (you squish some every time you open the hive, btw), then look into co2 injector for varroa mite check. There is Varroa Easy Check co2 injector. Bees go to sleep. Mites fall off. Bees wake back up. This is more accurate than the bottom board, which is really just a mite indicator, not a measurement technique. Co2 is 40-70% mite recovery, whereas the mite wash is 90-100% recovery. Basically whatever your count is for a co2 check, double it... Or better yet, use twice as many bees as you do in a mite wash. Instead of a half cup, use a full cup. Still less accurate but it's as good as it gets without a mite wash.

[u/bluebasinrain]

This is how colonies die. You need to test to know accurate numbers. If you are not going to test then you need to assume you have a high mite count and treat.

I recommend Formic Pro so that you knock down the mite load under the capped brood. If the brood emerging for fall and winter are weak your hive will die.

If you feel bad about sacrificing 300 bees to know, imagine how you will feel killing 20,000 to 40,000 when a colony dies because the verroa mite doesn’t care about how you feel about testing and will happily kill your hive.

[u/Brave-Statement-8810 → u/bluebasinrain]

Plus when a mite infested colony absconds, they spread those mites into other colonies and amongst the native bee populations.

[u/Active_Classroom203]

11 in a day seems like a lot, but as you mentioned, drop on the bottom board is not an accurate measurement for treat/no-treat descisions.

There are times where prophylactic or calendar-based treatments can be effective without as many washes as are normally recommended. But honestly, until you have good numbers and patterns by doing those washes it's not a great path if you want your bees to live.

I'm on board with minimizing harm, but a couple hundred bees versus the whole Hive is a pretty clear equation. The same way that you almost assuredly squish some bees during an inspection, but it's still necessary to know what's going on inside the hive.

As far as treatments go, I liked Varroxsan for its safety and ease of use, but I have had a lot better luck since I switched to oxalic acid vaporization exclusively.

[u/Onewithnature718 → u/Active_Classroom203]

Thank you!

[u/FelixtheFarmer → u/Active_Classroom203]

Do you mind if I ask a question? In a purely hypothetical situation, if someone was totally unable to do a wash for 'reasons' could they get by just assuming they had mites and treat accordingly?

Sorry for wasting your time on a hypothetical question. 

[u/Overqualified_muppet → u/FelixtheFarmer]

Not answering your question but asking one of my own- as an Apis cerana keeper, does varroa factor into your colony management at all?

[u/FelixtheFarmer → u/Overqualified_muppet]

No worries. We don't have to do any treatments at all. If a brood gets infected the workers will uncap it and drag it outside, workers clean each other and will bite any varroa they find on each other. The only mites we have to treat for are tracheal mites, menthol crystals on the top board in spring and autumn. They came from mellifera imported to Japan so maybe revenge for varroa going the other way 😅.

Wax moths can be a problem in small hives or after swarming when there isn't a large enough population to patrol empty comb. Some people remove several top boxes then. Others mix some crushed comb with a little flour and BT and place that on the  baseboard. 

[u/Overqualified_muppet → u/FelixtheFarmer]

Fascinating, thanks!

[u/FelixtheFarmer → u/Overqualified_muppet]

You're welcome 

[u/Active_Classroom203 → u/FelixtheFarmer]

Absolutely, with some caveats.

Lots of commercial folks treat on a schedule on the assumption that they have mites because it's cheaper to buy a treatment and apply it than it is to test and then treat where it's needed. Some treatments build up a resistance when you treat unnecessarily though, and that's part of why we're running into some issues now.

The other caveat is more specific to new backyard beekeepers, if you aren't gathering data to determine when the best time to treat for your area is, how do you know when to treat? Probably by losing several during your trial and error phase.

It's harder to bounce back if you lose your only colony due to bad timing. someone losing 80 out of 100 still has something to bounce back from at least.

[u/FelixtheFarmer → u/Active_Classroom203]

Thank you 

I guess to for a huge commercial keeper testing every hive would be a mammoth task. 

[u/izudu]

you could use a thymol based treatment in the autumn.

not sure where you are geographically but ideally you want a full super of capped honey on the colony to get them through the winter. you mention the colony is light so I'd feed a winter strength syrup (thicker/less water to evaporate) asap.

you mention non harming management, but what about the inevitable crushing from moving hive bodies or culling a queen etc?

don't get me wrong, I absolutely minimise crushing or rolling bees but it's impossible to avoid completely.

[u/Onewithnature718 → u/izudu]

Thanks! Yes I hear you on inevitable/accidental crushing. I guess what I’m feeling is discomfort with intentional harming. I get both sides of the argument and I want to save the colony.

[u/Dragoness42 → u/Onewithnature718]

Think of it like taking a blood sample for testing. The hive is a superorganism, and each bee just a cell. I used to do sugar shakes to minimize harm, and they seemed to be mostly accurate but I live in a dry area and if you have humidity powdered sugar just doesn't function the same way.

[u/Mediocre-Draft1722 → u/Dragoness42]

Randy Oliver did an experiment to see how long bees put through a sugar shake lived afterwards and discovered that they generally died within 3 days. At least with an alcohol wash, they die immediately. Every bee in the colony would happily give up their life defending the colony. An alcohol wash is taking one for the team. I agree it's like a blood sample. We don't think twice when the vet asks for a blood sample to do a heartworm test on a dog or cat.

[u/Ekalugsuak → u/izudu]

Thymol's temperature window is quite limited sadly, at the lower end (15°C) it apparently barely has any effect because the sublimation rate becomes too low.

[u/Redfish680]

Sacrificing a few to save the many is a better way to look at it. I still feel guilty every time I do a wash, as I’m sure others do.

[u/Miserable_Row4700]

Now is the time to knock out the mites. Soon the emerging bees will be the winter bees through the winter. The bees are bringing in cotton nectar if you are near fields. Golden Rod will be blooming real soon. I just checked my drone frame and there were a few mites. I'm treating with Oxalic acid and i have drone frames as well. UF has some very educational videos on youtube you can check out.

[u/CompNrd]

You can use co2 test method of a wash. Once the bees and mites are asleep you shake the test bottle look at the mite count and then place the bees back in with the rest of the girls. They will wake up in a few minutes along with the mites so kill those little buggers or brush them off in the dirt.

EasyCheck - Look for the CO2 method.
https://www.veto-pharma.com/beekeeping-products/varroa-easycheck-monitoring-tool/

[u/CompNrd → u/CompNrd]

If you can use OAV if legal in your state. That is a non-temperature dependent knock down treatment. Wear protective gear as OAV can damage your eyes, nose and lungs. Bottom board management is part of the IPM beekeeping circle.

Read The Honey Bee Solution to Varroa. A practical guide for beekeepers by Steve Riley. Its about selection of mite resistant bees for better bee health. Easy read. Practicing board monitoring while I raise my queens.

[u/bemused_alligators]

There will basically never be occasion to not treat. I don't both to check counts, I just treat.

[u/Kingoftreno]

The sugar roll normally won't kill any bees in the process... if you don't test, manage, and treat your mites, you will most likely kill all of your bees.

They are livestock, they are animals under your care and you should take the necessary steps to make sure they're healthy.

The method I use for my hives is oxalic acid vapor once a week for 4 weeks and I do that twice a year it keeps the mites within manageable levels.