06/30/2021
Greetings from Betterbee! How are your spring bees doing? (If you got bees from us this year, you should get this update in an email that went out yesterday. Didn't receive it? Please check your spam folder!)
We saw a lot of swarming in May, and though it can be frustrating, it means the colonies were populous and healthy. Swarming is a strong impulse to beat since it's the way bees have evolved to spread across the landscape. A swarm leaving in May or June does not prevent the remaining bees from bouncing back by summer's end, and can slightly reduce the number of mites in a hive.
Since June 21 the days are shortening, and by early July, the bees will notice this and enter more of a "mindset" of prepping for winter compared to their earlier urges to build comb, grow, and swarm.
By now, syrup feeding should have stopped for most colonies. Nectar should be available nearly every day. Nectar is a colony's normal food and stimulates wax glands to make wax. However, if you don't have comb built on all frames in 2 deep (or 3 medium) brood boxes yet, and progress on comb building stops because you’ve removed the syrup feeder, you should replace the feeder. Remember: Don’t feed you bees so much that they pack all empty cells in the brood area with syrup! This restricts the queen’s mission to lay eggs. Also, we never feed syrup when honey supers of comb are on the hive. We don’t want sugar syrup stored in honey supers, since it will never become honey - just thickened sugar syrup.
It's important to be fighting Varroa every month. Varroa are parasitic mites that all honey bee colonies have in some amount. Mites reproduce inside capped bee brood cells, so mite numbers increase more quickly as summer goes on and the colony continues to grow. Despite claims from some unscrupulous queen suppliers, there are no known bees that can completely withstand mites without a beekeeper’s help. Breeders have been working towards the goal of mite-resistant bees since mites arrived in the U.S. in the 1980s, but they haven’t produced a mite-proof bee, so our bees still need our help. Aside from not over-harvesting honey, killing mites is the best way to keep your bees alive. Untreated colonies may live through one winter, but will not be strong in the spring.
If mite control is left until October or later, chances are that viruses transmitted by mites have already compromised the health of the bees that were raised in September, and the colony will die between Halloween and Christmas. Mite-borne viruses prevent bees from digesting food, prevent them from maintaining body temperature, and harm their brains, glands, wings, and immune system. Each of these contributes to winter death.
The easiest way to see how mites increase is to count mites on a
sticky tray that is slipped under a screened bottom board for 3 days. Count the mites and note the number and date. Do this every two weeks. Have a miticidal treatment on hand, and when you see daily numbers of mites rise to 9 per day (27 fallen mites in 3 days), it's time to treat.
A faster way to count mites is the Sugar Roll (about 5 min/colony), or even faster: the Alcohol Wash (3 min/colony). If you see 6 mites in your 300 bee sample, that’s a 2% infestation. Time to kill mites! Recently, we tested a colony with an alcohol wash on Day 3 after doing a 3-day sticky board drop, and the alcohol method collected 6 mites from just 300 bees, even though the sticky board beneath the whole colony for three days had caught just a few mites. The higher number may have been because during the 3 day monitoring period many bees had emerged from their cells, with new mites on them. This shows how important it is to have an ongoing understanding of mite numbers, and to be able to test for mites using multiple methods.
At any rate, don't be surprised if about 2 months after hiving your bees, mite numbers say it's time to treat for mites. And about 2 months after the end of that treatment, the few mites who survived will have probably have multiplied enough to need killing again. Keep counting! Don’t be complacent!
At Betterbee we've started our summer treatments, since some yards have some hives with high mite levels. Quickly learn about all mite counting methods in this article.
Note that the screened bottom board and the use of confectioner's sugar to dislodge mites from a sample of bees are methods developed to count mites, not to control mites. Don't expect the screened bottom board or a whole-hive application of confectioner's sugar to have much effect on mite numbers.
If you live in an area where the weather is usually below 85 degrees F, Formic Pro or MiteAway (both formic acid products) are good options, because they can be used while honey supers are on. HopGuard III is another one that can be used while honey supers are on, but it’s not quite as good as Formic Pro, because Formic Pro can kill mites in the brood as well as the mites on the adult bees (which all miticides kill)! The biggest risk with formic acid treatments is that when the weather outside is too hot, it can sometimes start to kill bees, and even lead to queen loss.
ALWAYS READ AND FOLLOW INSTRUCTIONS, with any miticide so you know exactly when and how it can, and can't, be used.
Later, after your honey supers are off the hives, Apivar is a mite-treatment option. It has no temperature constraints; it just has to be within the bee cluster to be effective. In winter, after brood rearing is done, Oxalic Acid is a popular miticide, whether dribbled or vaporized. It can’t pe*****te the brood caps to kill mites underneath them, but does a good job at killing mites on the adult bees.
Note that one mite treatment per year is NOT enough. You need to treat multiple times each year to properly control mites.
For those of you with 1 to 6 colonies, you might try drone brood removal. This is a non-chemical method that can have a significant effect on mite numbers, though it should really be used as a supplement to other mite-control methods. Mites prefer to crawl into drone brood cells to breed, even more than they like worker brood. If you keep 2 drone brood frames at the edge of the brood nest and remove them on a strict schedule whenever a new generation of drone brood is capped, you will also remove hundreds or thousands of mites. The key is never letting the drones in the drone brood frames emerge, because if you do, you just helped the mite population grow! During one season, you may get 3 cycles of drone brood and mites that you can freeze to kill. In August the bees tend to fill drone frames with nectar, so this method can’t be used through the whole summer.
Using the drone brood removal method MAY be enough to allow you to skip a midsummer mite treatment. Used along with mite counts, you may see that numbers do not rise high enough to merit a chemical treatment until September when many of us are doing treatment #2. Of course, you won’t know if your mite-control plan worked unless you continue to monitor your bees for mite levels throughout the season.
Please write or call with your questions! If you do send us an email, it's always helpful if you can send us a photo or video to clarify exactly what you're asking about.
