NEWSLETTERS &
SEASONAL TIPS
After the spread of bee diseases, in the past year the importance of cleanliness when beekeeping has come into focus, and this isn’t about having a bath before visiting the bees, it’s about clean equipment. Wash your protective equipment regularly on a HOT wash; clean your wellingtons after every visit to the apiary; wear disposable Nitrile gloves over your gauntlets; clean you metal ware in hot washing soda; throw your hive tool in the dishwasher, incidentally, did you know that a queen excluder will fit into a standard dishwasher? (New dishwashers cost about £350!) Scorch empty hives with a blow torch; scrape empty brood frames free of propolis and brace wax before treating with Acetic Acid; stack supers wet to avoid Wax Moth or treat the wax with Certan to kill predatory moths. By keeping equipment clean your bees stand a better chance of keeping healthy.
With the Varroa mites now being largely resistant to the “traditional” varroacides (the Pyrethroids, active ingredients in the Bayvarol and Apistan strips), and all the alternatives available to us being less effective than the old strips, we now have to do “Integrated Pest Management”, which means applying a combination of treatments and management methods throughout the year in order to keep the mite numbers at a level that the colony can tolerate. Probably the most important link in this chain of individual measures is the Autumn treatment, to prepare the colonies to go into Winter with a low mite burden.
If untreated, the mite population in our colonies will under normal conditions have doubled every month throughout the season. Now, towards the end of the active season, the Queens will reduce their laying rate, and the raising of drone brood will usually cease altogether. Therefore, all these mated mother-to-be mites will enter worker brood, sometimes more than one mite per larva, and they and their offspring will damage the developing bees. As time goes on into Autumn, more and more of these bees will be the “Winter Bees”, i.e., the ones that will have to take the colony through the Winter, and then into Spring, by bringing up the first generations of new brood and bees, generating the “Spring build-up”. The Varroa damage will shorten the life-span of these winter bees, they will make poor nurse bees, and as a result, the population “explosion” from March or so will only be a feeble puff: the colony will be held back forever and may even die.
In the past, the honey used to be taken off the colonies towards the end of August or even in September. A Varroa treatment after that is now considered too late, for the above reasons. In the case of treatment with Apiguard, the later in the year this treatment is applied, the less likely it becomes that the day-time temperatures are high enough to guarantee a reasonably good efficacy. This means that we ought to take the honey off at the beginning of August, middle of August at the latest, and start the treatment. That way, you may lose some of your honey crop - but what is this against losing your colony?
Apart from Apiguard, there are now, new to this country, ApiLifeVar, an Italian product that has been approved by the Veterinary Medicines Directorate earlier this year; it is a hard-foam wafer, like “Oasis” used in flower arrangements, impregnated with Thymol and essential oils (open with scissors!); and Thymovar (a similar Swiss product that has more recently received approval from VMD).
After the Autumn treatment comes the Winter treatment with Oxalic Acid (medicated sugar syrup), applied with the trickling method, ideally to a brood-less colony, which will most likely be the case after a spell of very cold weather. Here, dosage is important, as too much will damage the bees, while too little will not kill the mites.
Justus Klaar