Using Apiguard for Varroa Mite Treatment transcript

we're doing our second round of apa guard on in this yard we've been doing the whole outfit with apagard i used apivar last year i thought i'd switch it up and use apa guard this year it's not hard to do um this will be the second round and then after this we'll wait about a week and do some mic checks and if the might still look a little on the high side we'll give it a third i'm hoping we'll get away with two rounds it's been a while since we were here i've been trying to do the yards every seven days but it's been raining a lot and we've been been having a hard time staying on schedule they've been maybe 10 days since we were here yeah yeah it's been a little while and we're feeding feeding them as we go if they look like they need it anyway it's just this is more about moving fast quantity work instead of quality we'll get all this treating done a little bit of feeding and then when we're satisfied that we're done treating we'll go through every colony carefully and do a queen assessment and re-clean any colonies that look like the queen is not doing real good this particular yard has almost entirely queens from last year last fall these were september queens last year so they're just now one year old so they'll still be good in the spring they'll be about a year and a half old in the spring i'm always touting that we like to re-clean every colony every year and the reason i'm not going to reclaim this yard is it has genetics that i want to use in the spring to mate with you can't see it in this shot but on the other side of this field that this yard is on the edge of we set up a new mating queen mating nuke yard this summer and we'll do it again next year too and after i've used as much of these genetics as i feel like i need we'll go ahead and reclaim sometime next year this was an excellent yard of bees this is this uh caucasian carniel and stock we've been trying to generate and i think it's safe to say this is one of our best yards of bees this year fairly gentle really produced massive colonies they got really huge back when they were brooding up properly they're shrinking quick now because they've been in a diminished brood rate rearing mode for quite a while now the the pollen flow spring pollen flow probably stopped here a month and a half ago and we're noticing that most of our colonies don't have much pollen in them now but the golden rod is going to start soon probably within a week or two that's where we're trying to get this mic treatment out of the way before we uh start raising the winter views april guard has a tendency to slow or in some cases even shut the queen down so she's not laying at all and i don't mind that happening this time of year i don't have a need in our area to go into winter with massive colonies with a huge cluster i don't even like to see big you know 12 or 14 frame clusters in these double deeps anything from five or six frames to eight or nine frame suits me just fine they'll be ready to split on time next year we don't travel anymore as i've mentioned in many of my videos so we just stay in place here in the southern appalachian mountains and i don't need huge clusters coming out in the spring to make early packages or nukes or pollinate in california or any of that stuff so so far we've been really happy with these genetics and anyway we're going to show you how we do the this video is really about how we do aprigard i kind of got sidetracked there jesse's doing the squirting the gel jason's doing the feeding and we're just going to go through really fast one thing that i've done before we got started was we're doing 30 uh um for the singles and 50 for the doubles so i just went ahead milliliters and went ahead and marked that on the syringe so i don't have to look at that try to make things go a little quicker uh and of course you just want to stir this stuff before you start and uh when we do this we move pretty quick okay let's find some bees have moved a little pad there normally you have seth putting the lids back on but he's running the camera right now so he can't do it that's all there is to it so it's approximately 50 grams we're putting on these double deeps like jesse said we put 30 on the singles it's not super hot right now it's only getting into the low 80s for a high when it says 50 milliliters we're really really close to 50 grams also now if it was in the 90s as for a high we'd back that on down but it's been in the low 80s to the mid 80s so i feel comfortable doing that level got to be careful with this stuff in hot weather you can run the bees right out of the colony slap out of the yard so jesse let me get a shot of you adjusting the milliliters there uh [Music] um these rims are important important part of it um these are three quarter inch rims we've been making one inch rims lately we use those rims both for this type of treatment and also pollen patties sometimes we put pollen patties on in the spring [Music] okay so let's go ahead and fill this one gallon bucket too this one was real light when we were here before that's why i got that gallon hey [Music] so kind of nice having martin yesterday yeah we didn't get to have martin for a little while he's been in the bottling room poor guy i think he likes it in the bottling room he has fun with the girls they call martin brown sugar do they yeah they yeah do got really sunny all of a sudden well this is a yard of single same routine we just give them 30 grams instead of 50.

[Music] hey bro look at all that propolis around there seth that's uh i don't like that stuff do they we're gonna check these colonies for mite counts before we treat them see where we stand we use this that focusing so we kind of use this tupperware tub to just carry all the pieces and parts around with us we put a our half cup measuring cup which if you put that level it's really close to 300 bees we've actually counted them a couple times and you get really close to 300 bees when you use a half a cup [Music] when you do a mite wash you need to take ideally you want to take bees off of open brood my understanding is that you'll find a higher concentration of mites on the nurse bees the i think the mites are hanging out on the open brood waiting for an opportunity to enter sales just before they get capped and somehow they understand that that's the place to be if they're going to accomplish that so we will be shaking bees off of open brood and we will look very close of course to make sure we're not shaking the queen in i don't see her you ready that's a perfect frame oh [Music] what you got zero two stingers i'm gonna shake for just a few more seconds just to double check this one this one seems to be queenless so we're not gonna necessarily go by that no one mine one might okay keep shaking we'll get another call keep looking keep looking this is a perfect frame this frame is full of open brood so it's the perfect uh perfect frame for checking for mites you only got one yep okay well don't throw the alcohol yes sir we usually we use the alcohol over if it's just got one or two in it we can use the alcohol over and over just do the math [Music] hmm so now we got less right now we got less okay we gotta check one more this is yeah i'm not ready to accept there he is so you found your one again i found the one we go through six or ten uh colonies and do a a might wash and only get one or possibly two i won't treat i don't treat for the fun of it and three that's total yep so two technically yeah so the last colony gave us two mites so we got some zeros we got some ones and we got a couple twos just gonna treat once and the this yard will be done being treated for the fall if we don't sell it this fall we'll hit it again with oxalic acid in late november and early december sure just two yep two yeah that's good news all right street and feed