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  • General Q&A, Bee chat and only Bee chat please
General Q&A, Bee chat and only Bee chat please
 #8545  by Steve 1972
 21 Aug 2020, 18:58
Brilliant news Nigel that you finally got the long awaited Island mated Queens...the weather could have been a little better though..
Regarding the aggressiveness of usually gentle hives i now know what the problem is with mine..(wasps) in good numbers.. i have been viewing the entrance every evening of the four colonies in my H/pool apiary after work and i see the odd wasp hawking around the entrances with a ball of bees around each tunnel entrance..nothing is getting in and the wasps i seen sharp give up...so i put a trap right near the hives two days ago and i checked it tonight..it is in a ceder brood box + eke with only the trap part sticking through a plywood board above the eke..(ceder hives full of propolis seem to attract wasps for some reason even empty)..anyway the trap was packed full of dead wasps that obviously have been hassling the colonies and making them a tad feisty...tonight i viewed the entrances and very few bees where guarding the entrances so the trap must have mopped up the troublesome Jaspers..
 #8547  by NigelP
 21 Aug 2020, 19:44
Not seeing many wasps around me now....they peaked late July. More worried about nucs with introduced queens being robbed, dearth of forage around me at the moment. Even Rosebay willow hear has finished...and that usually finishes around early Sept....hell we might even get an ivy flow for the first time in living memory if things go on like this.
 #8551  by NigelP
 22 Aug 2020, 15:01
Checked hives on the heather and was greeted with that wonderful unmistakable aroma of heather honey. Just not in the quantities I was hoping for. The weather has been pants and forecast to remain the same. Just hope we can sneak in a good week at some point. Heather beetle damage is very obvious in places, compare the two pictures of the same area taken a few years apart, the bare one is what it is like this year....still plenty of purple around in patches thankfully.

Image

This what the area looked like a couple of years ago.

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 #8552  by huntsman.
 22 Aug 2020, 17:07
Checked the tray inserts which I scraped clean yesterday.

Four hives and not one varroa drop over 24 hours.

Cleaned them again and this time I gave each tray a light Vaseline smear. I will do another check in three days.

No treatment since Oxalic trickle last December.
Last edited by huntsman. on 22 Aug 2020, 21:23, edited 2 times in total.
 #8553  by NigelP
 22 Aug 2020, 17:37
For what it's worth Huntsman I don't trust random drops on a tray to tell me current varroa levels. I've had very similar results to yours and then after vaping 1000's dropped. A sugar or an alcohol roll will give you more accurate results, but both are time consuming and you kill bees with the alcohol. Even a dusting of icing sugar (accelerated drop) will give you better idea of current levels,,,,note...icing sugar is not a good varroa treatment.
I've come to conclusion that I need to treat annually (at least) and do so. And monitor the drop during treatment to make sure it is all working.
 #8556  by AdamD
 23 Aug 2020, 07:47
The beebase calculator suggests using 7 days as a minimum sampling period. However it is a very simple model and doesn't always get it right. For example, as bee numbers increase repidly during spring, the colony may well be able to cope with increasing varroa numbers. As September approaches, bee brood numbers are in natural decline and the varroa numbers will continue to increase so the proportion of varroa in the stock will get significantly worse. For my bees it's from July onwards that I see the dangers.
 #8557  by AdamD
 23 Aug 2020, 07:50
Nigel, are your Keld Brandstrup queens "varroa busters"? I.e. have they supposedly got any varroa sensitive hygene traits.
 #8558  by NigelP
 23 Aug 2020, 09:33
No. The only Buckfast breeder offering these is Peter Stofen in Germany. Can't quite see the appeal as they don't breed true so next generation is not hygienic. It appears that you need your own inbreeding system to maintain hygienic behaviour, such as Instrumental insemination and lots of data crunching to know which queens to breed from.
 #8561  by Patrick
 23 Aug 2020, 22:28
Sadly I don't hold out much faith in varroa drops either. The number of times I had zero or close to zero drops was simply not credible. Hence today (way late this year, for the worst of reasons) I put on apiguard. Not used it in years since MAQs came onto the market, but thought it was about time I rotated treatments - not too chuffed to be back to 4 - 6 week treatments I will be honest. First time I have stripped down hives for ages and they were not happy about it, but today was the only day I have had available in weeks to do it and won't have another for a while yet.

Bees were in a foul mood, I suspect the ending of nectar flow, large wasp numbers hawking about and rubbish recent weather not helping. They all had variable amounts stores but the bees were also really in robbing mode themselves which meant being very careful in putting everything back together bee tight. I took off some dry supers and workers were on them as soon as I put them down. I had hoped to just leave on the summer crop this year to tide them over winter and not feed as well, but there really isn't enough there to do it safely, so feeding is still on the agenda. I remember having issues trying to feed with Apiguard on, so it looks like being a late one to get feed in this year, which is never my preference but so be it.
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