First year beekeeper. Three packages and two swarms. I checked for mites with powdered (unfortunately only once) and only three of the five hives. Counts were 2-1-1. This was August. All hives had a brood break during supercedure or swarming or having been a swarm.
It is going to be above 40 here a few times this week. All hives haven't shown any DWV or any other signs of mites (to my untrained eye). They have been doing well this winter and so far all are still alive. My question is, would you treat if you were me? I just got done finishing up a DIY vaporizer, works well so far outside the hive. I most likely will not do so, but I am just interested in what more experienced people think?
My understanding is that the temps need to be above 37 at the time of treating. Is there any period of time that needs to be above or at that threshold after treatment?
Well, this is what I do to catch them. There was a thread asking how to kill his hive off because it is infected with the mites. In response to the beekeeper I use my hives to try to save it instead of killing it entirely.
The reason for not using another round of OAV is that
this is a recovered nuc hive. The mites level is very low now after the first infestation. As of yesterday, I did not
find anymore mites in there. So to further test the hygienic bees
out, after they were clear of the mites, I put another 2 frames
of emerging bees from another hive with the mites in there. Again, this is
to test their mite clearing ability to assess the queen's potential for a possible grafting this Spring.
So first to clear the mites to allow the nuc to rebuild. After that infect the same nuc hive with 2 frames of bees with mites on them. If this nuc hive is indeed has the mite fighting ability then it justify my reason for not killing it entirely (to the new beekeeper.) And that it can recover after the first infestation with a 2nd round of mite attack. Combining mite fighting ability and OAV intensive treatment it is possible to save a hive. Don't have to kill it off entirely is what I want to present to the new beekeeper. We're here to save the bees not to kill them off when they got the mites.
Catching the mites with a razor to cut it in half is because I don't want to treat with another round of OAV to kill all the mites and allow the 2nd infestation a possibility to further access the situation in the nuc hive. This is how I ran my little bee experiments here. Yes, killing them all with OAV is simple and not too time consuming. But it does not allow you to learn from the mites and develop the mite fighting bees, locally. I already found a hive with similar mite resistant traits before but didn't know how to preserve its genetics but instead killed off the resistant queen. This time I hope to recover what had been loss from before. I don't want to go looking for the bees with mites on so rather have some mites here for the test subject. So retaining some mites is the only way to do my little experiments on in the future. I want to learn about the mites as much as possible. It is not my intention to kill off all the mites entirely for this experiment to work in the long run. Glad that you ask further.
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