Varroa Mite Treatments transcript

we're back today to do apag guard treatment on these colonies I'm also going to take a minute to talk about something we've been experimenting with and I'll show you that once we start taking the lids off of these colonies we're near Mountain actually we're near Diller Georgia and uh I want to show what we're doing with the AP guard Selena likes using these Queen excluders to prepare the cards beforehand and we'll talk about dosage here these are all single story colonies all of our colonies except for one yard this year are single story what I consider normal if temperatures are say 83 or 85° fah or lower a normal dose for a double D would be 50 gam and I would also say that 30 G would be the proper full dose for a single and last week we did a number of singles and gave them a full dose of 30 G the temperatures were in the upper 70s and low 80s and that worked but the forecast for tomorrow is 90° here it's going to be 88 today so we're going to cut the dose down to 20 grams for a single you can really ruin a colony by using full doses of apagard in hot weather it can it not only does it shut them down it can actually drive them out of the colony ask me how I know that I learned that the hard way a long time ago so we're using using this hypodermic type Gizmo that comes with these tubs of apagard and she just uh wouldn't you know when I'm videoing it doesn't go right so you can see she's putting 60 gram in there and then she's going to put 20 grams on each card John and I will go open the colonies up and prepare them and she'll put the card right in there it's really simple now let this truck go by the other problem with doing this uh 20 G or what I would consider half a dose is it won't last as long we opened up some colonies that we've done this to and within a few days it's gone so normal timing for a full dose would be um 10 days to 14 days you come back and give them the next full dose and then that's considered considered a full regimen with the half a doses normally you would consider uh maybe 5 to 7 days as the right time duration then you come back and do it four times and because we're going down to 20 gam I expect this to be gone in just three or 4 days so I think 5 days will be the right time to come back now just because the thol is completely gone or it's completely disappeared and just a couple days doesn't mean it's done working that you can still smell the thymol in the colony uh for a couple days after it's seems to be gone and that's because it's absorbed by the beeswax um ethereal oils like thol most of them tend to be absorbed by beeswax but the good news is they dissipate very quickly in other words a week or two later it's gone that's completely different than some of the synthetic chemicals that are out there today one is amitraz which is what we see as the active ingredient in apivar another is fluvalinate which is the active ingredient in um AA Stan and another is kumas which is the active ingredient in checkmite the chemical amitraz uh does not hang around a long time it breaks down into two metabolites or basically two compounds I'm sure there's some other minor things but there two major compounds it breaks down into one is referred to as DMF which is a long word that I can't pronounce DMF amitraz does not show up as amitraz when you have a a lab test done it shows up as DMF M mainly DMF has the properties where it stays in the honey it migrates towards honey or water-based products whereas things like fluvalinate and kumas do just the opposite they are readily absorbed by a lipid or a fat which is exactly what Beeswax is so um that's a problem the other problem is that fluvalinate and kumas I wouldn't go so far as to call them forever chemicals but I would call them a pretty darn long and a beehive chemical they they have a tremendous Half-Life in beeswax they just don't go away they don't interact with some other chemicals very well um specific interest to beekeepers is fungicides and of course other pesticides but fluvalinate has been shown to interact poorly with pristine and some other fungicides that are very common common so uh I would recommend not using apistan or check Mite as a m control AP ofar not so bad that chemical tends to go away with time but those other two do not e that's one of the reasons we're I've gone completely organic I do not use any synthetics in my colonies anymore Organics all of them either are not absorbed by beeswax or go away pretty quickly um for instance formic acid and oxalic acid are not absorbed by beeswax at all there's no problem there at all um whereas U the synthetics are all absorbed in one way or another either by the bees wax or or the honey e e okay these are oxol extended oxalic acid release pads much like the Swedish sponge routine that Randy Oliver has talked about so much a friend of mine Greg Rogers did a excellent presentation at the North American honeybee Expo on these things and uh pretty good data and I will admit here that this is the second year I've been doing this we've been playing around I feel very comfortable doing this I don't feel like we're doing something wrong that's going to contaminate the honey oxalic acid vaporization has been okay to apply with honey supers on there is lolic acid already in Honey to a minor degree and um research studies have showed it's really I'm not even sure if it's possible to use these type of treatments and get enough oxalic acid in your honey to go over what is considered the acceptable limits it uh for some reason just doesn't seem to be absorbed by the honey so there's a product coming out called uh baroan if I'm pronouncing it right it's much like the ALU and cap product that's sold in South America I'll put a link in this at the end of this video video for that study that I was involved with it showed that it does have an effect but the effect is interesting it's not a Curative treatment although I've seen some claims that it is I don't believe it is it tends to keep your might Lum might numbers down if there are any down and if you have high might numbers you probably need to use something besides this because this will not tend to bring High numbers down it kind of keeps your numbers at a flat line and that's all we wanted for this summer we just didn't want our mic numbers to go through the roof before we got around to do an apard around the 1st of August I'm not going to get into the recipe for this product um Randy Oliver has talked about it at length I would recommend going to his website scientific beekeeping tocom where he talks about it at length and I'm also going to try to film Greg Rogers in September when he's going to do his present for the Georgia Beekeepers Association and if it goes well and it's a good good film I'll put that up for everybody to see we're going to do some mic counts here you got the kit out John yes you got the mic kit let's do some mic counts here I want to see just what we got this colony is a dud right here let's put the lid on this thing do you have a particular one oh just pick one it doesn't matter pick the one you got right there right here yeah it's just uh we're going to do several M counts in here our M numbers were pretty good coming out of winter because we did do oxalic acid vaporization back in December when the bees were broodless which really does put a hurting on the M numbers and even in early April when we were doing M washes we were still getting a lot of zeros I think we had one one in these colonies that uh did not go south for the winter we had about 200 colonies go down to South Georgia for the winter and in those colonies the numbers were uh notably higher and we are going to uh check some of those colonies too before the day is over and compare but uh I've already checked several yards like this I just wanted to do some on film here so we could show uh what kind of M numbers we got in these colonies so we use this veroa easy Che kit which which works good for us there's a few different U brand names of this situation on the market today we're using the veroa easy check works for us we sell them in our store they're not expensive anybody who's serious about beekeeping really needs to look at uh uh their mic numbers throughout the year several times that's a pretty healthy looking brood pattern right there I know the camera doesn't pick it up well I see some of the larva glistening turn it over on the other side I see some larva glistening in the light they actually look really healthy there's not a lot of brood in our colonies right now but uh and that that's one reason why these large number of bees are going to shrink soon because as the older summer bees that were here for the honey flow start to die off the limited amount of brood is not going to replenish those numbers to the same extent and Jo John just dumped in that's a half a cup and he had it kind of overflowing so a half a cup of bees is around 300 it's not rocket science we're not interested in extremely precise numbers because that was so overflowing with bees I'm going to guess he has 350 bees in there might be a little more and he will shake this thing for about a minute 60 seconds don't just do it for 10 seconds and think you're done um he'll do this for 60 seconds and then we'll look at the mic numbers Selena is still pulling these pads off these are looking pretty good here Selena than sure what you got John two I think three three two or three mites three three mites okay we've been in some other yards where we only had zeros and ones but uh three four might be couple more one no I just see three okay all right so because we have three mites in there we're just going to use the alcohol again on another Colony I want to keep going let's check some more the bees don't seem ill do you are you getting stung at all Selena not at all not at all I got stung just once you got stung once okay yeah they seem to be in a decent mood even though it's really overcast my goodness it's not the best day to be working bees but uh so far we're not running into anything exter ex mean soon as I say that John's going to get stung this seems a little anxious but okay glad to see a little brood in there some colonies have almost no brood yeah that actually looks good of course that's about to change this apag guard will shut the queen down and I'm okay with that this is just uh let's see I think it's the 30th of July today and for the next month there will be very little pollen coming in and it tends to be a natural time for bees to be shutting down and then in about 3 or 4 weeks the Golden Rod will start blooming and they'll start producing uh brood in Earnest so now is a good time to shut the queen down and get the M treatments in one of the reasons I really like to do M treatments at this time of year is because I want to get these colonies really clean before they start rearing winter bees if you get a heavy might load and the uh viruses start to show up and things like that it actually takes several weeks sometimes maybe even a month to a month and a half for the viruses really to get cleared out even after you have taken all the um even after you have uh done all your might treatments so um you need to get your bees you need to get your bees cleaned up before they start rearing the winter bees quite often in our store we have people come in and complain about losing their colonies over the winter of course my first question is um did you treat for mites and if they say yes I ask them when you'd be surprised how many people treat their bees for mites in in this area in September and October and think they're doing the right thing because they're treating the bees before winter that's not the right thing you need to be treating your colonies before they're raising the bees that have to make it through winter if you haven't treated uh before the bees for winter are being raised and hatching they're already compromised to a slight extent with you know not only the damage from the mites but perhaps the viral load that to the might's vector a lot of these viruses are already in the bees much like human beings you know as long as they're immune system is intact and in good condition they U they'll fend off some of these viruses but the moment they begin become compromis because of M pressure suddenly they start succumbing to these viruses and the viruses start showing up up in a much bigger way so I'm going to say it one more time treat the bees that are going to raise the winter bees don't treat the winter bees what you got John so you started with three right okay so this colony had one might in a 300b out alcohol wash that's a good place that's a really good place to be around the 1st of August honestly so and I'm going to show some clips from some other yards we other yards we did this uh M check in we saw very low numbers one yard we couldn't even find a might in they were all zeros so I'm pretty happy with how this extended holic acid release treatment worked again it's not a Curative treatment if you go into into uh using it with high numbers like 10 15s 20s you are not going to bring it down to one or two you're going to still have fairly High numbers but if you start out with really low numbers it'll keep it low until you can get around to doing a more serious M treatment we put this stuff on around the middle of May and it's now the end of July so it's been on for 2 and 1/2 months so John wants to know why I'm laughing I'm standing here doing all the camera work and you guys are doing all the work I'm not doing anything so I really wanted to make this video though to try to get some of this this stuff out um what you pay us for that's what I pay you for yeah again because it's only 20 gram it's not going to last a long time and I expect to be back here in no longer than 5 days if this was a full 30 G i' I'd take longer you know 10 days maybe and this is actually important in the early days 20 or more years ago I was using apard and uh putting it in between boxes at that time I was using a deep and a shallow as a brood nest and I would put that card in the middle and I've since learned that whether you're doing a two box brood system or a single like we have here it's actually best to put it on top and it's actually better if you use a rim anywhere from an inch to an inch and a half is ideal um I used to have 3/4 in rims on all my Lids I don't have those Lids anymore and that worked but I honestly think if you can get your Rim up to about an inch to an inch and a half it'll actually be a little bit more um effective I know I don't I can't explain that it's just casual observation but uh I think these rims are inch and a quarter and they work pretty good which colony is it John the one in the very the most Corner one that there okay John says this colony is doing very poorly and we can see it from here it's only about four or five frames of bees in it um it's not sick it just seems to have a poor Queen We are going to go ahead with this treatment we're going to get all this treatment done and then after we're finished we will inspect every Colony every brood Nest make a call on every Queen every Queen in this yard is from this season that this entire yard in fact our entire outfit except for four specific yards has been reined and I often say just because it's a new Queen doesn't mean she might not have to be replaced I have no problem replacing a queen from the same calendar year if she's not doing well we'll let this one go through the treatment period and then we will be uh replacing a few more queens before the season is over we've got about 80 to 100 nukes sitting in the field where we can collect Queens if we want to and and uh I know what we do is pretty labor intensive and may not actually if you pencil out the money labor part may not be the most efficient way to run bees but it's just my way I like to get everything as good as possible and I'm not afraid to spend a little extra time and a little extra money doing it makes me feel better for one thing I know a lot of guys and I have to at times in the past just let the chips fall where where they may and then in the spring or or late winter picked up the Duds and that's legit that's what a lot of commercial beekeepers do but we we actually make the effort to get everything in As Good As shape as possible going into winter also I guess I should comment about some of these empty places on these pallets um we did have a few swarms in this yard and we did a wholesale requeening so if a queen didn't take and they raised their own and it wasn't successful that shows up as an empty spot or if a calling swarmed and did not requeen itself properly that shows up as an empty spot so that's what we're looking at here is colonies that actually went queenless at some point during the season a lot of newer beekeepers don't realize that just because the colony swarms and produces a new Queen there's no guarantee that that colony is going to be successful I don't know the exact percentage of failure but I'm going to guess 75% uh perhaps 80% of the colonies are successful requ clean them and the other 25 or 20% that are not they go queenless and they turn into Duds we have three different types of Queens in this yard um I got some Queens given to me by Ry Alvarez at Alvarez honeybees out there in California becomes sort of friendly with him and seems like a nice guy and he wanted me to try some of his saskatraz and some of his Golden West line of bees the golden West comes from Randy Oliver of course the saskatraz bees come from Canada so they're mixed in here along with some bees from us and we're just going to do some comparisons this year um our all of the bees are doing well um then we also got some Pole Line Queens from um some folks in Massachusetts and Florida and then I'm going to get some more out of Louisiana that I'm going to recen those four yards that I mentioned that are not rec queened yet they're going to be part of a research project so I'll talk about that much later when we get into it maybe next spring anyway good bees all lines seem to be doing well South Patra Golden West and our Caucasians all seem to be coexisting side by side all doing well and all look much the same in strength and health and everything at this moment these colonies for the most part are pretty heavy they're going into this treatment phase with a plenty of food we do not have to treat or I'm excuse me we do not have to feed at this time after the treatment is over and we're inspecting all the brood nests and making a u a call on the quality of the Queens at that time we will figure out who needs to be fed and how much they need to be fed we'll probably put a number on the lid like a one two three which would represent one feeding two feeding three feeding so um but that that's the good time to make a real judgment on everything Queen quality feeding everything everything that'll come after the treatment period is over um I want to say something about this oxalic anol you you don't want to use it at the same time oxalic acid and thymol have a at least a mild synergistic toxic interaction when they're in the colony at the same time oxalic acid is not absorbed by the comb so taking oxalic off and putting thol on right away is a zero issue if it was reverse I would be wanting to take a little time between the treatments thymol is absorbed by the beeswax comb but it dissipates very quickly so if I was having for instance if I was putting thymol on and then backing it up with an oxalic I'd want to wait some a while so the thall would dissipate and you weren't exposing the bees to both compounds at the same time other words what I'm saying is do not have oxalic acid and thymol in your Colony at the same time again they have somewhat of a toxic synergistic chemical interaction okay we're in our Highlands Road yard just out of Dillard it's between Dillard and Highlands North Carolina it's a little bit of a higher elevation yard and they did good too this yard unlike the last yard is entirely queens that were raised by us a lot of Caucasian genetics in here they look about the same huh John uh yeah yeah pretty much it's funny how some of these guys Cho up their little pads and others barely touched them we do see from time to time we'll see a few mites on top of these pads but not a lot of course again these colonies started with fairly low numbers and what I'm glad to see is that they still have fairly low numbers let's do some uh might tests here too John okay go ahead and grab that kit please we keep that kit in our side box it goes everywhere we go we always have it we run across a colony that seems to be compromised for some reason first thing we want to do is do a mic check and make sure it's not um a mic problem looks like a decent pattern huh she is good eye John John is good at spotting Queens especially if they have a big Green Dot on their back huh John that tends to help yeah Johan I think this is going to be the winter where we replace these pallets they're kind of looking old and a little bit rotten yeah they've been here for a minute they've been here for a while yeah so this winter we will switch these out what you got two see two two yep okay not terrible let's do a couple more okay so a little educational moment here we quite often tell beekeepers to take the outside frame out first so there's less danger of rolling a queen but if you notice John's very good at just making an extra4 in or 3/8 Gap in there and pulling that frame out without touching anything and that's why we feel comfortable taking frames out of the middle simply because we had a lot of practice at it new beekeepers I would recommend taking an outside frame out first because the queen is less likely to be there a little less danger of rolling her as you take the frame out I think we can use the same alcohol there's only two mites in that wash kit so let's just use the same alcohol over again what you got just the same twoo so you got a zero here huh yeah okay zeros are good what you got John uh the same two same two so that colon is a zero also okay one more and then I'll give you a break we'll quit okay [Music] hey John which is like I know there's another one in there I guess okay you got two yeah the same two same two so this colon is a zero also so we've got several zeros and and one with a two that's a good place to be I think we got the general idea the most mites we found in any of these that had these strips is three over the last couple days that's a very good place to be around the 1 of August normally we would see things like fives and T and other numbers like that so and even more like you know occasional 15 or 20 we're not seeing any of that except for the bees that went to South Georgia and I have to assume that's because they had a much longer brooding period down there they got the same treatment but they did not go hardly go broodless in the winter I know it's boring I know so far nothing huh nothing you got zero again yep so now the question is why are we treating for mites yeah um I have a new attitude on mites I don't treat mites to bring the numbers down I treat mites so I don't have high numbers in the first place we are going to go ahead with this AP a guard treatment um I really want to have as low M numbers as possible and we we we're we're going we're going to continue doing M checks here we just got three zeros in a row and I know better than that I uh I'm sure that some of these have some mites in them so these guys are very patient with me they know when I pick up the camera that everything slows way down to a snail's pace that's okay we have fun with it this is fun I'm enjoying doing these YouTube videos and showing our experiences and talking about what we do and what we see and I try to keep my ego out of it and if I see something that I've done wrong go ahead and report that too and I do do things wrong I've been doing this since 1981 and there's not a year goes by that I can't look back and go man I wish I wouldn't have done that every year there's something that I just uh and the thing is is that every year is different there's no such thing as two years that are exactly alike and that's part of the art of beekeeping you got to be flexible and go with the flow uh be able to change with the times and do what's appropriate in the moment okay so I just got through editing the video that I'm going to put out on Sunday morning about might treatments and after reviewing it several times it has occurred to me that I left out something that I feel is pretty important it's something I'm beginning to feel kind of strongly about and that is the idea that the future of Might suppression is not going to be about more and better might treatments but that the future is going to be about and needs to be about better genetics it's going to be about be breeding for beekeepers as a whole it's already starting to happen with Mother Nature I know of a number of uh pockets of feral bee populations that are flourishing and growing without any treatments at all and many smaller beekeepers and some commercial beekeepers too are starting to have these lines of bees that can go without any might treatments at all and I see it from time to time in our own outfit um we many people that watch our videos will know that uh we really like Caucasian bees because they're so gentle and easy to work with and we like some of their other characteristics too and sometimes when I alcohol wash an entire yard we'll see some mediocre to perhaps High might numbers and then have one or two that show no mites at all or perhaps very low numbers and really that's the beginning of the B breeding program right there so we're going to start to work with our own population a little bit while at the same time bringing in some genetics from other lines that uh are showing already showing might resistance incorporate a little of that and I think that's the future of our outfit I will still be treating for mites I'm not going to quit treating and let my whole outfit just collapse while I breed from the survivors but I I think we can still treat and make big inroads deep inroads into uh better be genetics at the same time and uh in the future you're going to see me talking about it because that's the direction we're going to go I think the future is with better genetics I really do hi my name is Jesse I'm one of the beekeepers at Blue rid honey company I wanted to take a second to show you what the might wash kits look like in our trucks starts off with a 15 cart plastic tote that we get from Walmart inside of that we have a roll of paper towels a/2 cup scoop which is about 300 bees 91% ID isopropyl alcohol and an easy Checker there are four different types of fluids that you can use for your washes the most effective being the 91% isopropyl alcohol or the da Ultra dishwashing liquid the recipe for the liquid is 1 and 1/2 tablespoon to 1 gallon of water uh a little less effective is the 70% isopropyl alcohol and the0 degree windshield washing fluid and then a little less effective than that is the CO2 or the powder sugar the Dawn and the isopropyl alcohol will kill your bees but that is a small price to pay for the future of your Colony so we start this procedure off with having an empty tote and then filling your easy Checker halfway with the fluid of your choice I like to choose a frame of open brood with capped brood so that I've got a chance of finding the most mites and then make sure the Queen's not on there I shake the frame into the toe the foragers will start to fly home leaving me with the nurse bees I'll tap that into the corner grab my half2 cup scoop place the bees into the easy Checker quickly and replace the lid go ahead and get them wet let that work its magic while you return the bees to the Colony and then start swirling your easy checker for about 60 seconds after 60 seconds I'll check the bottom to see if we have any mites if we see more than two to three mites um we knew we know we want to do something viruses start to show up when when you see a count of 15 mites or more and you'll definitely start to see the compromise Colony Health next after you've done your mic roll toss your bees and we like to try to use the alcohol that's in the wash multiple times if we can we'll put everything back in the tote and this goes back in the truck all nice and neat we try to do M washes once a month and definitely before we treat and definitely two weeks after we treat to make sure that the treatment worked