Oxalic Acid Vaporization Mite Treatment transcript

it's November 25th today and we're going to do some oxol acid vaporization treatment here these bees for the most part still have a little bit of brood in them but we're going to do it anyway because they're getting sold in a couple days I uh thought I'd give this guy one oxol treatment before I gave him the bees these are the bees I showed in last week's video getting ready to go to Florida and uh they're not going to go brutalist in Florida anyway so we might as well give them a treatment now and give him a little bit of help I know he'll be treating with something down there in short order those Florida beekeepers treat quite a bit more often than we do up here um it's cold morning sun is just coming up right now I think it's out there somewhere and it's about 40° 39 40° which is pretty good temperature um the ideal temperatures for doing this vaporization are between 40 and 50° fah in my view the reason for that is that you don't want the be you don't want to be so cold that the bees are clustered tightly that way the vapors can um penetrate the cluster but you don't want to be so warm that they're flying so that's how I come up with 40 to 50° F I suppose if you had to have the perfect temperature it probably be around 44 or 45° F we're giving these guys 4 gram each and one of the reasons for the full 4 G is we're not uh putting Rags at the entrance if we were sticking a rag at the entrance right away as soon as we treated 3 Gs would probably be ample I've been looking at this uh the concentration of vapors closely and I think the point of diminishing returns is just a little bit past 3 G per box other words 3 G is better than two but when you get to four it's not very much better much more effective than three so I think as far as uh efficiency goes three 3 and 1 12 gram is probably a sweet spot you having fun yet John oh yeah we are using those yellow insulator silicone insulator thingies on top of the tool they're kind of expensive for what they are but they do seem to help a little bit [Music] show me that tool up close just just hold it right there I want to show something we've done hold it up right here the tool this thing yeah we have bent the uh the brass fitting in the front to be more conducive to using with our 3/8 entrances um we just bent it a little bit and if uh because it was cocked up just a little too much with the 3/8 entrances it worked that little bent that little Bend just helped it be a little closer to level than it would have been especially with the insulator the insulator was kind of bumping up a little too hard I think these are actually engineered to use with 3/4 entrances honestly so what we're going to do uh the whole outfit's going to get a a real good treatment in about three to four weeks from now we're going to do it later than normal because the bees do have a little bit of brood in them because of the recent warm weather I think the warm weather and all that pollen coming in is subsiding now so 3 to four weeks from now I don't expect to see much Brew that'll put us into late December and that's okay as long as it gets done it helps a lot to put a rag in front of there it holds some of the vapors that's why we're giving them a little heavier dose at 4 G um we just didn't do it this morning forgot about it honestly to be real honest the sock works well so the light blinks until you when it's going fast it's it's doing its thing and then it'll uh now it's slowing down and then I don't know exactly what that slow one means but I know once it's solid it's done okay that little the only goes down is we only have two batteries have4 run out yeah Jason built this nice little carrying box for Selena and John so they could keep all their vaporizers and batteries in one box keep everything organized as you can see we have four vaporizers these are the instant VAP compact units and we have eight batteries so while four units are burning we can have four batteries being charged or in backup we're using pretty good batteries we went with the Milwaukee unit because these batteries have a reputation for charging very fast and they say you can charge up to 50% in just 15 minutes and in this instance I think that's probably something that's important we use these two Chargers you can have two on each one these chargers draw four ramps each so they can run with a th000 watt inverter if you so choose we have a 2,000 watt Honda generator already so we just chosen to go that route we keep it on the truck with all this stuff and uh it can run while they're uh working in the yard they even sometimes leave it run on the truck bed when they're going from yard to yard no big deal it's a very quiet generator and it can be charging batteries while in transportation um we like these compact units um I actually went this route on the recommendation I got from Cayman Reynolds he likes them too they make a bigger unit and if I remember correctly I I think I heard Carrie in one of Ian steppler videos saying that she preferred the bigger one could have been because it warmed up quicker I'm not sure it's been a while since I watched that video so some people may choose to go that route we're happy with these compacts they work pretty good let's see you can see here let's look at this closer you can see here now we bent that nozzle just just a little bit you can't bend it too much or it'll break on you and that's all it took to make this unit a little easier to use with a 3/8 entrance um we have been using proaps in the past they work too and there's pros and cons to both I think these units are actually a little quicker one of the drawbacks of these units is that nozzle is not a straight shot into the bowl and if you get that thing clogged up it's a little more difficult to unclog than a provap so uh answer to that is to clean them out steam clean them after every use every yard and so far we've had zero issue with that I'll link a video at the end of this video that shows how we do that and I made a video earlier this summer when we first got started using these so far so good we're happy um something that I think is important is what type of oxalic acid you choose to use we're using something that is supposed to have supposed to assay it a minimum of 99.6% pure right there and it actually came through on this one at 99.8 that's a good place and this is the company we purchased it from Savannah Georgia if you're in the Southeast you might choose to go with these folks so far we've had good luck with them they get it out right away seems to be no issues at all this is the second time we've used them there's the price and the freight for those four bags um let's see what else can I say okay um I'll show the four bags show what they look like well the four bags which are 55 lbs each will last us a year we can uh get through the winter all the vaporization and then have plenty in the spring for doing the extended acid release pads that we have shown in earlier videos and even have extra if we need to do any kind of vaporization for any reason later in the season so I think we're ready to go honestly we're going to do two at least perhaps three treatments um some of the bees still have a little brood in them some have gone broodless and then later on it could be just the opposite some of the ones that have brood now could be broodless and the broodless now could have some brood so just depends on the weather and the temperatures we just entered a cold period uh this morning I woke up to uh the thermometer on my saying 17° F the bees will not be gathering any kind of pollen in that type of weather and that's been the problem they've been bringing in a little pollen so it's supposed to be cold all week for the next 7 to 10 days so I think the brood rearing is going to come to a halt and in a few weeks we should have a bunch of broodless colonies and we'll hit it hard of course we'll spot check we want to make sure that uh we know what we're doing if we don't get them when they're broodless it's not as effective because a lot of mites are hiding in the brood of course I'll go over to the office here and show the bags that came in these are the four bags that just came in 25 kog a little over 50 lb probably 55 lb or so and uh 99.6 minimum and I think that's important and the reason is if it's got a low Purity you're going to have a lot of minerals and things that can clog up your tool and oddly enough some of the brands that are actually been okay to use are not as pure as some of the stuff you can get just from a chemical company so