It was interesting how the speaker made it sound such an effective method and he even said that major commercial beekeepers in Italy who run even as many as 1000 hives are using this method. And then the responses in this thread made it sound as if it really hasn’t worked for others. Perplexing. Well I wondered about with the cage is whether the bees would end up gumming it up with wax or propolis. Maybe it wouldn’t be as easy to reopen as it appears in the textbook demonstration. Particularly if you’re leaving it there all the time, which is what Ralph said many beekeepers do.
So I've seen the Buchler videos and became interested like a few people on this thread. We also never have a natural brood break here in coastal California, so I wanted to try out what would happen if I could have them go broodless during out dry late summer/fall. Sorry I'm reviving an old thread, but no one has answered the OP about the Var-Control cages used in the US.
After initially contacting the company in Italy to inquire about shipping some cages, it was going to be expensive because I only wanted 20 cages. Then I found support from my local beekeeper's club and we finally made an order for about 80-something cages and the cost per cage with shipping was about $4.
I've used the cages a few times now and they've become really useful, not just for brood breaks, but confining the queen in general. The bees do not propolize the cage. You can keep it in the hive just like Ralph said all year long. I've used it in langstroth hives and in top bar hives.
The way I use it is to confine the queen for 21-24 days so all the brood hatches out, even the drone brood if there's a lot of it. I found that the varroa count triples from the day you confine the queen to the day you release her because there's twice as much varroa under the cappings than phoretic at any one time. SO you don't want to do this if your counts are high already. It's not a miracle, just a non chemical way to treat, especially if you then let her lay on a trapping frame and then freeze it as soon as its capped (like the methods that Buchler mentions in his lecture series). Learning this method will come in handy one day when varroa get more resistant to chemicals, or maybe the weather is too hot for Formic Acid and I need to use hopguard instead but need the nice broodless condition for a contact miticide to work better. Once she is released, I treat with Formic acid or hopguard, or oxalic, whatever I think is appropriate. And no, my colonies have not died!
Another way I use them is to re-queen. Say I have a nasty aggressive queen and I want to be able to put a frame of eggs or some grafted queen cups from another gentle hive in. But if I kill the queen and then put them in, the bees might use a larvae from what the aggressive queen just laid before I killed her. And there's no guarantee they will make an emergency cell on the frame I just put in. Not wanting to go in again to an aggressive hive to look for rogue queen cells a week later, I can put the nasty queen in the brood break cage for a week and then remove her and put in the eggs. Then I don't have to come back for a month and know 100% they will requeen with the genetics of my choice. Same amount of visits to the hive, but much quicker and with more efficiency. I know I could also replace her with a caged mated queen, but this is cheaper given the price of queens these days! Also great for those who can't graft cells or just don't want to. Using the cage you can re-queen by inserting a frame of eggs! And you can probably do this with a regular queen cage plugged with a cork, but then the bees can't interact with her like with the brood break cage, so they might already start making some supercedure cells which you'd have to go looking for. The cool thing about the italian cage is that the bees can move in and out freely and continue to spread the pheromone as if she was not confined, so in my opinion it seems like better option since I have a bunch anyways.
Has anyone else used them? If so, have you got any tips and tricks?
