As our apiary has grown, we have streamlined stuff to save time and labor. If it’s awkward and time-consuming, chances are it won’t be fun and won’t get done. This spring we moved a yard onto 4-way pallets from the Blue Ridge Honey Company. After figuring out the details, mostly how to stay out of each other’s way while working, we decided they were way better than the 2 x 4 racks we have been using. More compact, hold more boxes, sturdier. Strategizing for better winter survival, we are going to overwinter this year’s nucs on double screen boards above double tens, and there is no way winter and gravity favor our old racks. No arguments even, we sprang for another set of pallets.
We have been feeding all the nucs and some full-sized hives to get them to a point where they pass the ‘box of rocks’ tilt test. Half the feeders were 1-gallon buckets, the rest quart jars. After a few weeks of screwing jar lids we agreed, again, and bought more buckets.
We drove down to the Blue Ridge Honey Company in north Georgia to pick these up the last week of September. Just guessing, the difference in the seasons is about 3 weeks between home and north Georgia.
Waiting to load the truck, we sat in the shade and chatted. We learned all kinds of things. First, about adverse effects several producers have experienced from Apivar 2.0. Search Facebook for more. Then the work BRHC is doing to find varroa resistance in its bees. BRHC often hosts visiting beekeepers. Trevor Bawden, of Lloyd Street Bees had been down and introduced them to his hybrid mite sampling method, more accurate than mite washing, way faster than a Harbo, and almost fun. Briefly, attach a Nair hair removal strip to a patch of aged, sealed brood, whip off the cell cappings, smack the frame on a sheet of waxed paper to knock out the pupae (about 200 under the strip), and then pour them into a mite washer. Better than shaking out and scooping up hostile adults and – always a worry – the queen. You get a solid estimate of the mite population in sealed brood, a more realistic metric of the hive’s mite content than phoretic bee washes.
Once home, we decided to give the Bawden method a try, it being time anyway. After opening 3 hives the yard erupted into a robbing frenzy. Data is important, but so is keeping colonies safe. Another day for data.
The colonies had been vaped with oxalic acid in late winter to knock down the new crop mites, then treated all summer with Swedish dish towels soaked in a slow-release oxalic acid/glycerin cocktail. Dead mites had recently been spotted on the towels, and we had just taken apart yet another ‘treatment-free’ dead out- tell-tale signs it was time to nuke some varroa. Back story on the dead out: we participated in a project launched by the Sustainable Beekeepers Guild of Michigan this year. We set aside 25% of the colonies to assay with the pin kill brood test, a proxy for mite damage which elicits hygienic behavior in bees. These hives were untreated all season. Their mite levels were sampled each month, and a frame from each hive was Harbo’d at the end of the project. A couple of hives maintained low counts, even reduced them after they spiked in August. These are keepers. Untreated colonies with high mite counts were given a full strength Formic Pro dose and the balance dish towels. Not everyone survived, but that was expected. Our bees are not varroa resistant, yet, and we know they need monitoring and treating.
Resuming, we are now vaping all the colonies with oxalic acid. Two days into this, 70 hives down and 80 more to go followed by another round, if not 2, to go until we get the mites under the cappings, we hit the efficiency wall with our Lorrobbee vaporizer. We hopped onto their website, and there it was: for a few colonies, model A is just right. Double that, and you are going to want model B. We have outgrown model B, and are past ready for model C, the InstantVap 18v Turbo OA Vaporizer, a sleek little battery-powered number, tested and proven faster and more efficacious. Lorrobbee strongly recommended a more powerful battery, so we bought the new vaporizer a present. We also bought a pail of EZ-OX. It is 4 times as expensive as the wood bleach available on Amazon and slightly less pure, but it loads in the vaporizer’s plunger better. Plus, it is sanctioned by the EPA, righteous stuff. Will this spending spree ever end???
We are owned by the bees, no question.