Most mite treatments miss half the mites

Varroa live in two places, and almost every treatment you can buy only reaches one of them.

Phoretic mites ride on your adult bees. Reproducing mites are sealed inside capped brood, feeding on pupae and raising the next generation. Essential oils, oxalic acid, and Apivar all work on the first group. They knock mites off the bees, the mites land on your tray, and the drop looks impressive while the ones under the cappings carry on.

Only a few products reach that second group. Formic Pro and Mite Away Quick Strips get through the cappings. Norroa works on reproducing mites another way, by stopping them from reproducing rather than killing them.

So if you have ever treated, seen a big drop, and then counted again three weeks later and wondered what happened, that is usually what happened.

It also explains why timing matters so much with oxalic acid vaporization. It works best when your colony is broodless or close to it, because that is when nearly every mite is out in the open. For most of us that means fall, as the queen slows down, and early spring as she picks back up.

Dose is the other half of it. The US legal limit is 4 grams per brood box, and a Primal Bee hive holds about three deeps' worth of space, so on paper you could put 12 grams in. Jason says that is far too much. Your hive holds vapor that a wooden box loses through the seams, so start at 1 gram, watch your mite drop, and work up only if you need to.

He also covered monitoring, including why a clean varroa tray does not mean a clean hive, the mustard strip recipe from the South Dakota state apiarist, brood breaks, resistant queens, and the two experiments from this group: Gabriel's six weeks of vaporized oregano oil running off modified air fresheners, and Jeff Hall's homemade adapter for getting oxalic acid vapor in through the top of the hive.

[Read (and watch) it here →]

🇦🇺 Varroa turned up in Far North Queensland, the furthest north Australia has ever found it.

🎧 Jim Tew marked Honey Bee Obscura's 300th episode from his bee yard, on mites, feeding, and insulation heading into winter.

🦐 Researchers are wrapping mite-killing RNA in shellfish polymer to get it into varroa intact.

🌾 Colorado's governor, a former beekeeper, signed a pollinator order after the state found some native species down by more than half in 35 years.

🏭 Beekeeping Today toured a frame and hive body factory in South Dakota, if you have ever wondered how your woodenware gets made.

Gabriel first met bees as a kid in New Zealand, tagging along with his dad. He didn't touch beekeeping again for decades, until his sister took a course two years ago and got him curious again. He read his way toward insulated hives and set up two Primal Bee hives this spring.

Then he found a University of Guelph study on treating varroa with vaporized oregano oil and decided to replicate it at home. His version runs on household plug-in vaporizers, washed out and re-wicked, filled with oregano essential oil and tucked under the hives on a Vaseline-coated board.

Towels around the base hold the vapor in. He ran it for six weeks and counted mite drop the whole way through.

He's careful about what the counts mean. Two hives with no wash counts can't prove whether it worked, as he says himself, so wash counts are in the next round.

Trying something unusual in your own hives? Reply and tell us, or post it in the Primal Bee Facebook group 🐝

If you have not checked your mites yet this year, do it this week. Pull your varroa tray, give it three days, and take a photo of it if you cannot tell a mite from a pollen grain. If anything looks off, follow up with a sugar roll or an alcohol wash before you pick a treatment.

We are back next month with another hour of your questions. Reply and tell us what you want covered, and we will build the session around it.

Until then, happy beekeeping.

The Primal Bee Team 🐝