Our August Varroa Mite Counts & Treatments transcript

Well, we're in full might wash mode. We're washing every colony. Uh we got a little over half the outfit done. We're seeing some with very low numbers and we're seeing some with very high numbers. This is a yard of Caucasian bees and we're just getting started here and we're already seeing more numbers than we like. Um, there's definitely a trend with Caucasian. They're more susceptible to mites, at least the Caucasians that we have compared to the other lines of bees that we've been bring bringing in.

But there's also the point that these Caucasians haven't been selected for might resistance except for the little bit that we did last year. Whereas the other lines of bees we've been working with have had years of selection. And we are finding some Caucasians that seem to show might resistance. And of course, we'll be keeping track of those and putting them in our Caucasian. How many did that one have, Cody? >> 57. >> 57.

Oh gosh, that's almost a death sentence. Hey, John. >> Yes. >> You know that one that looks so bad? >> Yeah. >> 57, >> right? >> 22, >> huh? >> 22. >> 22. That's a high number in my opinion. Obviously, we will be here tomorrow with might treatments and we'll see a whole yard like this. It'll have high might numbers and then it'll be one or two that are zeros or ones. And that's how you do it. That's how you select and breed.

Okay, before I shut off the camera, let's see what the fourth one looks like. >> Oh yeah. >> Oh, what we're doing is we bring in cups from colonies and just number on the table. This is just white board or white uh um masonite with a white surface and we use a marker and then he wipes it off when he's done that particular one and that's how he's keeping track of which colony the sample came from. So even 15 is pretty high.

I'll come back and take a picture when we're done with this yard and see how just how bad it is. This does seem to be probably our worst yard for mites. We've got three in here that we're going to do an oxolic acid treatment on right now, even though we're coming back in a day or two to do apa guard. See if we can save them. That's those are Let's see. We got a 57, a 62, and then we have one that has 52. Those are pretty high numbers.

Uh quite often that's just a death sentence. But we'll oxolic vaporize them today. Come back and give them apart in a day or two. The whole yard we're going to except for two. There's two colonies in here right here and here. This one. And we washed them twice to make sure we weren't making a boo boo. But this one washed a zero and then the second time a one and this one a one and the second time a zero. So there you go.

There's potential breeding stock. Those till those two will not be treated. And of course, we'll keep a close eye on them. This whole yard is Caucasian except for one colony. Number 35 is Buckfast and it has some pretty high numbers here, too. There's something about this yard. Couldn't tell tell what. I have no idea why this yard is so high, but there it is. I predict we will lose a few colonies in here at least no matter what we do.

Um, so we'll see how it goes. This yard's doing a pretty good job on mit so far. We'll have to treat some of them. There is a lot of zeros and ones. And interestingly enough, there's a lot of Caucasian bees in this yard, too. Of course, we've got a couple of Caucasian breeder queens we've been using. And we'll have to look at that and see which one these bees came from. This yard was interesting. Some mixed numbers and it uh has a mixed variety of genetics in it too.

Let's look at the page. Okay. Um B stands for buckfast. Question mark means we don't know. Uh GW is Golden West. C AU is Caucasian. in SF is we still have a few Santa Fe queens from down in Florida. Still have a little bit of remnants from pole line in here. And it's interesting the numbers. Here we go. The highest number in the yard is a Caucasian. We have a lot of zeros. Golden West Buckfast Pine. Um gosh, we only have one colony with a fairly high number and it's only 14.

So this yard is a lot better than the last one. So, we're going to come in here and treat tomorrow, but we will keep an eye on them. We'll be washing them again in a few weeks or a month to make sure we're not u making a huge mistake. So, now's a really good time to do apagard if we're going to do it. And then when the apagard's done in a month, the golden rod pollen will be starting to come in and that'll be a good time for them to fire back up and start rearing a lot of brood again.

We just washed the mites in this yard. We had two colonies that were a six and the rest were lower. Most were actually lower than a three. So, I'm not going to treat this yard at all. And yes, we might lose those sixes, but uh we'll see. This is a decent yard as far as might resistance. So these nukes were started from cells from Lloyd Street bees in Wisconsin mated with this yard which is queens that we generated earlier in the season that are showing some might resistance.

Should be a good combination. These nukes may have to overwinter over a double screen board. They're just now just three frames, four frames of bees and starting to come ahead a little bit. It's August 3rd. This time of year in our region, it's actually hard to get something to grow beyond its current size, number of bees. So, we might be able to boost them with a frame of brood just to get them a little larger before moving them into winter.

Hopefully, this is going to be good stuff, too. We're feeding one to one syrup. Um, we're starting to try to gain weight, but not necessarily plug them out. We still want it to be a little bit stimulative, which one to one does. It's not as stimulating as something thinner. It's kind of a happy moderate medium between thick honey and very thin honey, excuse me, thick syrup and very thin syrup for both putting on weight and stimulation.

It's kind of the happy medium. We only have one hole in that jar lid for these nukes. They don't need to take that syrup real fast. They're full of drawn comb. They're not drawing any foundation out at all. And when we come back in a couple weeks, those jars will be empty, which is fine. And again, no m treatments in this yard at this time. We treated every colony in this yard. Um, we kind of spot checked with might washes to determine whether it was off the charts or not.

And it's not. It's got a few mites, but the reason I'm treating every colony is I'm going to be selling this yard and I don't want to mess around with something I'll be selling to somebody else. Of course, we'll check after the treatments are done to make sure the queens are all doing decent. This one on the corner did not get an apagard treatment because it's got a virgin queen in it, and I don't want to mess around with a queen trying to mate and thymol in the colony.

I don't know if it's a bad thing or not. I just don't want to take a chance. Well, we did give it an oxylic acid vaporization just uh for the heck of it. It has no brood in it. Just has a virgin queen. The rest got a thymol apagard treatment in a gallon bucket. And we'll be back in 10 days to do it again. We have treated this entire yard. Soon as the treatments are over, I'll make it available for sale. It's primarily buckfast queens from California.

Some Caucasians, a few Caucasians of our making. Uh, pretty full of bees. Good condition. Take about a month to get the treatments done. If they don't sell this fall, I'll put them up for sale in the spring. I'm sure there'll be no problem selling them in the spring. >> 1910. >> This yard is doing a good job on the mites. We had to treat five. I believe the rest are a one or less and we've tested them some of these three times in the last month to make sure we're not missing something or something's climbing that we're not aware of.

We're on the 3rd of August right here. I think a zero or a one may be okay. It's not a bad number at this time. The others had like a three, four, five, six. those ones that we did treat. 50 milliliters for double deeps, 35 for singles. This yard we're doing a little bit differently. We're a little shy of rims. Don't have quite enough to finish. So, we're just putting the treatment in between the boxes. Years ago, that's all I ever did.

And it worked. And it works. And then I read an article by Randy Oliver where he done a little study and figured out that putting the treatment o over the top with a rim works better. And since that time I've used the rims, but in this case we're a little shorter rim. So I'm just going back and doing it the oldfashioned way, putting it in the middle. It does work that way. It's just that using the rim is a little bit better.

Okay, let's take those out. Selena, this is one of a handful of colonies that actually got the OA strips. When we were doing might count some time ago, we gave a few colonies that treatment if they already had might numbers that were a little bit high. These colonies are in good shape. This this yard made a pretty good crop of sour. I'm getting stung over here, you guys. You look like a waiter walking around, Cody. Yeah, that's how >> they're fighting off. >> You know, that could be why they're a little feisty.

If they're at war with the hornets, that can kind of make them ill. >> This is the yard last year. >> This is the yard that got hammered last year. Yeah. Did we already do this one? No, >> make sure you get me lifting deep because people don't believe I >> they don't know that you can do that. [laughter] >> James Lee from Michigan. >> He He keeps telling us in front of John that we have a competent crew. I'm like, uh, I don't know. >> Extremely competent.

Extreme Extreme confidence. >> Extreme confidence. >> Right there is the enemy. European hornet right there. They're starting to show up. I don't know if it showed up in the camera, but I spotted it. We're seeing a couple in every yard now. And of course, by by September, it's going to be worse than it is now. We're putting traps out, a number of traps in every yard. I told Clint to put out five or six traps in every single yard and we'll see how it goes.

Last year we lost two entire yards, every bee gone to European hornets. Of course, we didn't have traps until late August when we realized how bad it was. Hopefully this year we won't have anything going off the charts like that. We'll see. This entire yard is being treated because the entire yard will be sold next spring. Not messing around with Mike counts here. We're just treating them all. Make sure they're clean when they get around to being sold.

It's what is it the 6th or 7th of August today. We'll be back in 10 days to give them another full treatment and then they'll get the oxolic vaporization in winter when they're broodless. And once they start brooding up with the maple pollen flow in this location, that would be probably the third week in February. We can check them out, make a judgment, all the good ones be sold. Kudzu. It's everywhere in our area and it's quite often these days you'll be driving along a side road and you'll smell something that smells like grape kneehi and it's the kudzu bloom.

And from a distance you don't see any blooms. They're kind of hidden under the leaves. It's a purple lavender type of bloom. >> And the bees get a little bit from kudzu, not a lot. The honey's dark and it has a very purple red purple look to it. I've never made any amount to add up to anything. I've had a friend in Alabama report that he's made a super of it upon occasion and it was dark. In my opinion, it's not the greatest tasting honey, but if you got honey you can call kudzu.

It sells really well cuz kudzu is kind of famous in this area and it covers the trees. It It grows so fast. My goodness, it's uh crazy. I had a beyard about 10 years ago that I was in one day and the cudu was creeping into the yard and for some reason I came back the next day and I said to myself, I swear that that cudu vine wasn't there yesterday. So, I put a stick in the soil and just to see how fast it was growing, I put a stick at the end of one of the vines.

Came back the next day and it had grown two feet in in just 24 hours it had grown 2 feet. You can bury cars, you can bury houses with this stuff. Um, wood sheds like this little shed right here. And they easily hide one of those in a bunch of kudzu. Why would you want to do that? Well, let's see if we can find any flowers. It's August 4th and the earliest varieties of golden rod are beginning to bloom. It doesn't add up to much.

It's the later varieties that do us a better job of providing pollen. I've been told that there's over 20 varieties of golden rod in our region. And it's the later ones around the 1st of September that really give us a good pollen flow. I'm expecting a good pollen flow this year, unless it rains too much while it's blooming from golden rod because we've had lots of rain. Everything's in superb condition. And that golden rod pollen is extremely important for us to get the bees ready for winter.

The main flow of golden rod pollen will come after we're done treating with apa guard. So, it's perfect timing. The bees will fire up again. It's almost like a fresh new beginning like what happens in spring. You see beautiful patterns, brand new eggs and larvae. It's a good time. First, we need to get our mic treatments out of the way for the colonies that are getting treated. Now, we treated this entire yard because uh there's nothing here I want to sort out and try to keep for breeding stock.

This yard's going to be for sale, and we're just going to treat it all to be safe and make sure that the mites are under control for the time when it does get sold. Of course, as can be seen, some of them need a little feed, but mainly I just wanted to look at this golden rod stuff. It's going to be good if the rain doesn't come in at the wrong time. We can duplicate uh carbohydrates closely with sucrose syrup, but it's almost impossible to duplicate real pollen.

We hear terms like pollen substitute. I just don't think there's any such thing. There is such a thing as pollen supplement that can help at certain times when there's a total dirt, but nothing replaces mother nature when it comes to the protein that the bees gather in the field.