Acetic Acid Fumigation

[Mike Gillmore]

A question for anyone who may be familiar with Acetic Acid Fumigation.

If some of the frames being treated have small amounts of capped honey and some pollen, will the fumes penetrate the pollen or wax cappings and be effective on any organisms that may be in the honey?

[Mike Gillmore]

Any suggestions on where I may be able to search out the answer?

[tecumseh]

a friendly bump for mike...

lordy, lordy.... got me mike. what does the process profess to kill. I would think the compound is fairly benign.

[Mike Gillmore]

What I am looking at particularly is that the Acetic Acid fumigation process is being used effectively to kill both types of "nosema". Also, preliminary testing being done in Florida is confirming that packages installed into CCD dead out equipment which have been fumigated seem to be fine. But on untreated comb the packages begin to collapse again.

I'm just curious if the fumes will penetrate any remaining pollen or honey on the frames, and destroy the nosema.

This is all new to me... just trying to figure out the limitations.

[tecumseh]

I would suspect that the fumes would not penetrate capping as this seems to be the limitation in regards to gasing for most other 'pest'. Not sure if this would carry over to acetic acid fumigation.

maybe if we keep bumpting this question someone more knowledgable will respond....where did you hear of this application?

[Mike Gillmore]

It has been used for some time in Europe. If you google "Acetic Acid Fumigation" quite a few interesting sites are listed.