What a rollercoaster of weather this Winter has been. A totally different ride than our usual highs and lows of past seasons. I am optimistic that we will eventually get some moisture in some form in the upcoming months. Our hives are still at least three weeks out from being in the clear of surviving Winter especially since the warm weather and first pollen collection of the year has begun. Which means brood rearing and Spring build up is happening now. This takes an enormous amount of water and honey to raise and feed the new brood. Colonies without ample honey stores and overwintered healthy bees run the risk of making it into the new year only to die of starvation.
We went into this Winter with fifty three hives, and still have a goal of ultimately managing around seventy five hives, until I retire from education. In addition to overwintering double nucleus’ hives as usual, I have become a huge fan of overwintering side by side resource hives from Dadant. Thus far five colonies have perished, and all of them except two appear to be a Varroa Destructor load, not enough Winter Bees, or mite related viruses that ultimately culled them out. Of course, this has to do a lot with there genetics, and the fact that they could not deal with Varroa Mites and the viruses they vector on there own without beekeepers’ intervention. Which brings me to all of the new things I attempted over the last three years to see if it would decrease my “mite related” Winter loss percentage. I started counting mites (alcohol wash) in hives that were not growing, booming, and during robbing season. As well as, counting mite levels on our Treatment Free hives to see how low/high of a count/percentage they are managing on there own. Some preliminary thoughts/data follows…
- All hives had/have some level (percentage) of Varroa Destructor in there counts
- Beekeeper’s mite “threshold” differ on when to take action, but can be as low as one mite per 300 bees in an alcohol wash
- Some treatment free hives had/have a higher percentage/”threshold” of mites compared to others, and appeared to have no ill effect on them or there Winter survival
- Counting mites on fifty three hives is time consuming. Counting mites pre and post Api-Bioxal is time consuming. Now I know why some beekeepers don’t count mites at all, and just treat with various products prophylactically and hope for the best, but I don’t think that is best practice
- Most hives treated with Api-Bioxal did survive Winter, but not all
- Most treatment free hives survived Winter
- Api-Bioxal is super time consuming & must be done on a 21-24 day cycle when brood is present for ultimate effectiveness
- Most treatment free hive’s mite counts remained stable, or went up and down on there own without any interventions, infestations, or virus overloads
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