Varroa infestation levels are an enormous source of concern among beekeepers, making varroa control an essential step towards helping your colonies weather winter successfully.
There are various things you can do to make sure your treatment succeed. One key strategy is a brood break (queen caging or Scalvini cages). Another method includes feeding sugar syrup or other forms of sugar-based therapies.
Contents
1. Sugar
As bees chew through sugar, enzymes break it down into simple sugars that they store in their honey stomachs. When foraging for food outside their hive, some of this stored sugar comes along and makes foraging less likely to trigger attacks by Varroa mites upon returning home.
Sugar feeding has been shown to significantly decrease varroa numbers when brood numbers are at their lowest, such as summer nectar dearths or winter clustered units. Unfortunately, treating frames regularly with powdered sugar requires labor-intensive work that could potentially result in colony losses if done without supervision.
One experiment involved feeding bees a mixture of sugar and either cinnamon, chamomile or mint plant extracts; their bee workers were then compared against reference values; no significant variance was detected between their characteristics and those from each group.
2. Honey
Varroa mites pose a significant threat to honey bee colonies and can cause serious economic loss. Mites spread by laying eggs in developing pupa cells and eating hemolymph (bee blood), with larvae hatching out to consume adult bee hemolymph. Mites may kill individual adult bees or deform immature bees’ wings before killing an adult bee and spreading various diseases including deformed wing virus or Kashmir bee disease.
Sampling for mites allows the beekeeper to assess current levels in their colony and determine whether treatment is required. There are various methods available for mite sampling; sugar shakes and alcohol washes are two popular choices that allow the beekeeper to detect mite prevalence without killing or disturbing bees.
3. Water
Varroa mite populations typically peak during autumn. Therefore, it is critical that treatments be undertaken now in order to reduce mite counts so that overwintering bee colonies can develop successfully without interference from Varroa mites.
This treatment disrupts tracheal mite life cycles by preventing them from climbing out of bee bodies and seeking new hosts, making it effective both fall and spring treatments.
After receiving formic acid treatments, hives must be properly ventilated to remove water condensation and carbon dioxide build-up within. Otherwise, temperatures could become too cold to allow bees to survive the winter season. It would also be wise to provide access to both entrances, as this increases bee survival rate during overwintering.
4. Hydrogen Peroxide
Hydrogen peroxide is a colorless liquid used as an oxidizer, bleach, and antiseptic agent. It can be found in many household products – from cleansers and disinfectants to bleaching cotton pulp and wood pulp as well as being used as rocket propellant.
H2O2 is a strong oxidizing agent, capable of directly reacting with the thiol groups present on cysteine and glycine residues in proteins to degrade them into their amino acid components. H2O2 can be produced during various biological processes and plays an integral part in many redox reactions as it serves as an important signal transducer.
This invention provides a method of treating, preventing or reducing harmful pathogens in honeybee colonies with a formulation containing hydrogen peroxide. This oxidizing compound may be administered via controlled release strip, tablet, reservoir, polymer disc evaporation device or solid.
5. Alcohol
An alcoholic wash (such as Taktic or Apivar strips) works quickly to rid beehives of mites, but at the cost of killing some bees as well. Although beekeepers generally try not to harm bees in this way, from midsummer on a colony loses an average of 300 workers daily due to natural attrition; hence sacrificing them is justifiable in order to help sustain the hive and its goals.
If a hive is failing due to Varroa infestation, alcohol washing, thymol dribbling or oxalic acid vaporization could be helpful solutions. These treatments work by killing off Varroa without harming honeycomb or honey production. Sampling should also be performed regularly to assess mite levels and determine when treatment may be required; sampling should take place four times every season at minimum.
