Lesson 39: Controlling Varroa Mites Without Medication

Hello friends, from Long Lane Honey Bee Farms. Sheri and I (David) welcome you to another basic beekeeping lesson.

Feel free to share these lessons with others. We recently heard where a beekeeping association prints off each lesson and places them in a binder for their members. We are thankful to have an opportunity to help others in the wonderful field of beekeeping.

Today, I want to show you how to control your varroa mites without medication. I have a video below that show me treating an entire hive in about 5 minutes.

I have previously (Lesson 28) written an entire lesson explaining the history, reproduction cycle and how to identify mites. You might want to review that lesson before proceeding through this lesson on how to safely treat for mites with powdered sugar. That lesson can be found by clicking here or going to: http://basicbeekeeping.blogspot.com/2008/02/lesson-26-varroa-mites.html

Powdered sugar does not get rid of every single mite, but it greatly reduces mites in a colony if treated properly. Along with green plastic brood comb and screen bottom boards, powdered sugar treatments can significantly reduce your mite load. Maybe you should consider getting off the medication treadmill and approach mites with an IPM (Integrated Pest Management) method without chemicals. We sell a complete kit that includes a screen bottom board, two green drone combs and a powdered sugar sifting screen which you can see used in one of my videos below. This kit sells for $39.00. These one piece green drone combs allows the bees to raise only drones on these 2 frames. The mites prefer the drone cells since they stay capped longer. When sealed, simply freeze the frame, killing all mites in the sealed drone brood. Return the frame to the same hive and they will clean out the frame and repeat the process.

You will want to get rid of as many mites as possible now that we are into late summer. DO NOT carry a mite infestation into winter. Many mites carry viruses and can kill your hives during the cold winter months. But, if you can reduce your mites then the winter generation of bees will emerge without being bitten by a mite.

How do you conduct the powdered sugar drop?

IN A NUT SHELL: Pour one cup of powdered sugar onto the top of the frames in one deep hive body for a minimum of 3 consecutive weeks on the same day each week. A six week treatment is even more effective. The powdered sugar falls between the frames, coats the bees and causes the mites to lose their suction cup grip on the bees and then falls through the screen bottom board, or off of the bee on their next flight. I strongly recommend a six week application so you can be sure to break the mite's brood cycle.

If you treat only once, but the bulk of your mites are within the capped brood, then that treatment will only help with the mites that are out and on the bees or comb. But as soon as the other bees emerge, the mites spread again. That's why a six week application is so effective.

A MORE DETAILED EXPLANATION First, purchase some powdered sugar. There is a debate on whether the corn starch found in most store bought confectionery sugar may or may not be good for bees. Most of us aren't too worried about the small amount of corn starch compared to how effectively it helps reduce mites. However, if you have a good blender and some time, consider taking granulated sugar and grinding up your own corn starch free powdered sugar. A good blinder will do it very fast, but keep in mind that the sugar does become pretty warm when you grind it up into powder. The volume stays the same, so to make 2 cups of powdered sugar use 2 cups of granulated sugar.

Use 1 cup (8 oz) of powdered sugar per hive body and I do not treat my honey supers because I do not want powdered sugar in the honey. But, if you time things right, you can treat as soon as you take off your honey supers. This year my bees are still pulling in nectar like it is July, so I'm treating a few that still have supers as in the video below.

Next, head to the bee yard with your smoker, hive tool, sifting screen, powdered sugar and humble feeling of knowing that you are a beekeeper!

In this next video, you'll see me actually demonstrate the entire process. And, watch the timer because you'll see that it really doesn't take all that long to do a complete hive even with a stuck super on it!

Okay, let me answer a few questions that the video may prompt you to ask.

1) Why use a screen. Because it holds the bees beneath the treatment. Otherwise, they will fly up and out of the top as soon as the powdered sugar starts falling between the frames. YOU WOULD TOO!

2) What about the powdered sugar on top of the frames. Leave it, or brush it between the frames. Remember, bees love sugar!

3) Why didn't I have an inner cover on this hive. Because I have a special spacer attached under the top cover that does the same thing and makes it easier for me to lift open the top.

4) Why did you put your first deep on the ground? Because I use both common placement methods. In the video I placed my super on the inverted top cover, but placed my deep on the ground. I usually do not place my boxes on my top cover because they stick. I set them on the ground like I did my top deep, always putting the front down so I can place it back on the hive in the same orientation that I took it off. NEVER place a hive body on the ground with the frames down, like it sits on the hive. You'll smash all your bees on the bottom. Tilt it to its front, like you see me doing in the video. By the way, when you place the supers or deeps on an inverted top cover, you can also kill bees, and even the queen. But by placing it on the ground no bees are smashed. The queen does not fall off and the bees do not mind.

Finally, you must be stringent about your schedule. For six weeks, keep track of what day you did your powdered sugar drop. If it was Monday, then repeat the process every Monday for a total of six weeks. Do not fudge or skip or haphazardly complete the process.

Thanks for joining me today for another lesson. As our family business continues to grow, we'd like thank all of our customers who are so wonderful to us. Thank you for your support and business. We sacrifice many hours a day, answering email and answering questions on the phone and it is our pleasure. Many call in who have never ordered from us but simply found us on the Internet and have some questions. We don't mind, but we do need your business :)

We have completed our beekeeping Store/Education/Research Lab and it is really working well for us. And, this year our bees did very well, both in producing queens and honey! We still are producing queens, and September is the best month to replace your queen so that your new queen can lay a great winter generation and take off fast in the Spring. Do not put up with an old, worn out queen. MANY, many beekeepers go into fall and winter queenless. Please inspect the condition of your queens or else your hives will not survive the winter without a strong queen. If you need a queen, please call us at: 217-427-2678.

Our queens are grafted from our hives that have survived two Illinois winters and from hives that have never been treated with medication. We also select for gentleness, adherence to the comb, honey production and low mite counts. We professionally package our queens with 4-5 very young attendants and ship via USPS 2 day guaranteed.

Here's a video of our daughter Karee, preparing queens for shipment. She is choosing very young nurse bees and picking them off the frame and placing them into the cage with the queen. The queen is already in there.

Finally, do keep our upcoming class in mind, and remember now is a great time to purchase your Spring hive equipment!!

Until next time, BEE-have yourselves!!David & Sheri Burns
Long Lane Honey Bee Farms

ORDER LINE: 217-427-2678

EMAIL ADDRESS: david@honeybeesonline.com

WEBSITE: www.honeybeesonline.com

FAX: 217-427-2678

Speed Up Getting Combs Drawn Out & Filled

Hello from David & Sheri Burns at Long Lane Honey Bee Farms. We want to say a big hellow to all our fellow beekeepers and beekeepers soon-to-be!

Here at Long Lane Honey Bee Farms, we've been busy keeping up with rearing queens, building hives, processing honey and putting the final touches on our new store/learning center/bee-lab.









We've made great strides on our Illinois Queen Project. We produced so many great queens this year and sold many queens too. And by the way, now is a good time to requeen your hives. It is a little harder to have new queens accepted late in the year, but August and September queens will produce better brood going into winter, and will certainly help the hive to over winter. Do consider it! It is very important to requeen your hive once a year.




It has been a very productive summer for the bees. And our bees are still acting like it is July 11th instead of August 11th.



We are hopeful this is the case and that the bees will provide us with one more month of good, strong foraging here in Illinois.




I've had beekeepers call in and say something close to this: "I've got two hives and while one is doing great, the other one hasn't pulled out all the frames in their top deep yet. They just don't seem to be moving up at all. What's wrong and what should I do."

This is why I always encourage new beekeepers to start with 2 hives instead of one. Because if you start with just one, and it gets off to a slow start, then you have nothing to compare it to and nothing available to help it with.

During heavy nectar flows, your hive should look like this one in the video below. This is one of our hives working aster and other late summer flowers. This queen has done a great job at raising a huge amount of brood and that's why there are so many foragers now! A poor queen will have the entire hive down in number, which means less comb building, less bees, less nectar gather etc.



First, it is hard to say why one hive doesn't do as well as others. There could be many reasons. Generally, I point the finger at the colony's failure to maintain a strong queen. What I mean by that is that the hive may have supeceeded their queen or tried to swarm and made swarm cells and in the process the colony may have actually become queenless for a good part of the season. This does happen. In fact, in my opinion, queenlessness is actually a worse problem than mites! Maintaining a close eye on your queen and/or any queen cells is vitally important.

Between the months of April and June, you must inspect your hive every 14 days, making sure your queen is laying good and that there are no swarm or supercedure queen cells. During these critical build up months, you must maintain a good laying queen. Once I get into July and my nectar flow is at its peak, I seldom go back into the hive except to remove honey supers because I do not want to disturb the hive's passion to gather nectar for me. I stay out of my hive until the 2nd week in August and then I begin to prepare my hives for winter. August and especially September determines how well your bees will do in the spring of the next bee season.
So what is typical is that a hive will lose its queen, try to replace her, fail, try to replace her and fail again, and finally get the job done but considerable time has been wasted in the effort and after she starts laying, maybe they are not pleased with her performance and they replace her again. This can go on all summer. Other causes for slow build up might be that the queen was not mated well and is only able to lay an unacceptable brood pattern resulting in low bee population.

Beekeepers who choose not to monitor the queen and the brood pattern are taking a gamble and may find out much too late that the hive is not progressing well. When this happens, the first thing to do is to assess the queen and the amount of eggs and capped brood. Nearly solid sealed brood is what you want to see. Spotty brood means the queen needs replaced.

Okay, let's say that you need to get two deep brood boxes drawn and full before winter, and here it is in August and it doesn't look possible. What do you do? First, since this hive is weak, and you have another hive that is strong, swap locations during the middle of the day on a nice sunny day. By swapping the two hives, you actually are transferring the foraging bees from the strong hive into the weak hive because as they return to their home, it is actually now the hive of the weaker colony. Incoming nectar from a larger foraging team means more drawn comb too. Rember, it takes nectar to produce wax which is used to build comb.

Secondly, feed! Place an entrance feeder in the hive and feed 2:1 sugar water. If robbing is a problem, use a top feeder. We sell both top feeders and entrance feeders. Also, take two or three drawn frames with bees and move them up into the top deep and take the undrawn comb from the top deep down into the bottom deep. This will spark the bees to move up because some other bees are already up there.

If the weaker hive still does not seem to build up within the next month, say by the middle of September you should consider combining it with another hive. It is always better to go into winter with one strong hive rather than two weak hives.

If your plastic foundation is not drawn out yet, you might spray it with sugar water or you might need to melt some beeswax and recoat the plastic.

Visit our website at: www.honeybeesonline.com for a complete listing of our products and hives. Or give us a call at: 217-427-2678


Now, you've got to get rid of your mites!! This is the time of year that mites can be bad and spread viruses throughout your hive. A hive that enters winter with a mite infestation is likely to be doomed. So, our next lesson will give you some non-medicated ways to reduce your mite count greatly! Stay tuned.

Thanks for allowing us to share with you today, and please share these lessons with others. We are a family business, simple folks working hard to make a living. We're honest and sincere in helping you enjoy being a beekeeper. Help us out when you can and we will certainly appreciate it!!

If you have trouble reaching us by phone, please email us at david@honeybeesonline.com
David & Sheri Burns
Long Lane Honey Bee Farms
www.honeybeesonline.com
217-427-2678

Remember to BEE-have yourself!

Lesson 28: Varroa Mites (www.honeybeesonline.com) 217-427-2678

When you call us here at Long Lane Honey Bee Farms, there are two people who will probably be answering the phone. My wife, Sheri and our youngest son Christian. Christian likes to get his two cents in on the phone conversations too, so you might hear him in the background. I hope little Christian, who is now 5 months old, will one day become a beekeeper. If he does, I'll have to teach him how to keep bees from being destroyed by varroa mites. But, while we wait for him to grow up, how 'bout I teach you...
A bear devouring a hive is an attention getter! A flood or hurricane washing hundreds of hives down stream is terrifying. These are huge calamities which beekeepers go to great lengths to prevent. We'll put up electric fences or put our hives on poles to protect them from bears. We'll elevate our hives to tower above flood plains. However, many beekeepers do very little to protect their hives from what might be their biggest threat. We seem not to take small things very seriously...small things like the tiny Varroa mite. The Bible says it is the little foxes that ruin the vineyard (Song of Solomon 2:15).
Mites are visible with the naked eye, but they are small. I wanted to put a picture of a mite on a bee in here, but fortunately for me, I didn't see any mites on the bees I tried to examine. But if you google "varrora mites" you'll see plenty of pictures. Older mites become dark and are easier to see than young mites which are almost clear at first.
In 1987 mites were introduced into the US probably as the result of imported bees. Within the next few years mites nearly destroyed all feral hives. A feral hive is a natural hive not kept by a beekeeper, like a wild hive in a tree. But the mites did not stop at feral hives but reached deep within the bee yards of all beekeepers, driving many commercial beekeepers out of business, and hobbyist out of a hobby.
I remember in the early 90s a friend of mine said he was done keeping bees because it was cheaper to buy honey than produce it. Mites drove him out of the hobby. They shouldn't have!
THE MITE CYCLE
All hives will have some mites. Mites are found in a bee hive feeding on pupae and on adult bees. It is important for the beekeeper to understand the basic reproduction cycle of the varroa mite which takes place within the honey bee capped brood cell. An adult mated female mite is called a foundress. The female mite enters the brood cell just before it is capped. She then lays her eggs in the cell while munching on the pupae. First she lays an unfertilized egg and it develops into a male mite. Then her other eggs are fertilized and develop into females. Mites mate with siblings. After the bee emerges from the cell, so do the adult female mites, looking for a new cell. Mites are carried from one hive to another by hitching a ride on the bees.
Good news: We can successfully keep bees even though we have mites!
Okay, to be fair, I must tell you what you will be told by most entomologist and bee inspectors and what you'll read in most beekeeping books and magazines. They give you a standard approach for dealing with mites. So, I'll give you what they say, then, I'll give you my thoughts on the subject. For the record, their way is not bad, wrong or unwise. It is sound advice. And keep in mind that I am not a scientist nor an entomologist anyway, right? I just don't like to use chemicals in my hive. That's where we differ.
Most will tell you to do a mite count to determine if you are over the "economic threshold". This is a fancy way of saying there comes a point where too many mites can be bad for your hive. However, that's like someone telling us there is an economic threshold for rattle snakes in your house. One is too many right? So it is with mites. They can carry viruses and when they bite our bees, viruses are spread. So one is too many, but it is practically impossible not to have some mites.
This economic threshold is determined by placing a sticky board under your screen bottom board for 24 hours and then counting the mites that are stuck to the board. Don't buy those expensive sticky bottom board. Make your own. I'll write a future lesson on how to make a lot of these cool things. Based on your number, you determine whether you are over or under the economic threshold which basically means either you treat with chemicals or you don't. At least this is what is commonly suggested. If you have more than 50 mites within a 24 hour drop period, then it is recommend that you treat your bees for mites.
Of course, I have my opinion right? First, the sticky board count method concerns me. Here's why. If I have a very hygienic hive, they may be cleaning out the mites and the mites might naturally fall onto my sticky board. So, I might see a count of 50 mites, but it may not mean I have a problem, but just the opposite. On the other hand, if I only have 5 mites on my sticky board it may cause me to think I do not have a problem, but in reality, my brood cells could be full of mites and mites might be all over my bees and just hanging on exceptionally well.

So I do not trust the sticky board drop test. Let me tell you how I determine my mite levels and then what I do with that information.
1) Digital photography. I photograph several frames, take the photo back to my pc, and zoom in on my drones and worker bees and look for mites.
2) Open drone brood cells and some worker cells. I actually will pull out purple eye pupae and examine the number of mites on the pupae. Mites love drones because queens emerge from their cells in 16 days, workers in 21 days but drones not until day 24, giving the foundress more time to reproduce before the drone merges.
These two methods give me a much better read on my mite levels.
Mites will be in your hives. They are impossible to avoid entirely, but they can be kept to a level that will not disrupt the hive as much.
While it is true that for many years the answer was to treat with chemicals, this is not a good management practice in my opinion. With all our chemicals we seemed to have developed a super mite that is now resistant to our chemicals while at the same time, some of these chemicals have made our queens and drones weaker. Some of the approved chemicals can be absorbed in the comb for 5 years or longer.
Within agriculture, there has long been an approach called IPM for Integrated Pest Management. IPM is an integration of several approaches to keep mites below the economic threshold. While treating with chemicals is part of IPM, that is a step we try to leave out.

WHAT SHOULD YOU DO ABOUT MITES?

WHEN HONEY SUPERS ARE ON: Screen bottom board, small cell foundation, drone brood foundation freezing, hygienic queens and strong colonies.
ADDITIONAL APPROACHES FOR WHEN HONEY SUPERS ARE OFF: Powder sugar drop
First, if you are just starting out with a new package this year, it will be vary rare to have a mite problem within your package of bees. It is possible, but I typically never see mites that much in the spring or early summer. I just don't care about mites until July and August. Mites become more aggressive and spread more rapidly in late summer around August.
You see, I want my bees to produce honey from April through the second week of August. And they do. I try to stay out of my hives as much as possible during heavy nectar flows so as not to disrupt their bringing in all that honey that my customers are lined up in my driveway waiting on! And, you can't use chemicals any way when you have honey supers on the hive. If you do, your customer's honey will be contaminated with chemicals that can harm humans. You DON'T WANT THAT!!
But, there are some things I can do when my honey supers are on to cut down on mites. First, I use screen bottom boards. I used to be a staunch solid bottom board fan until I experimented with a screen bottom board. Wow! I immediately converted all of my solid bottom boards over to screen bottom boards. When mites fall to the bottom of a hive with a screen bottom board, they are gone, and cannot make it back in. On a solid bottom board, they simply wait for the next passing bee to get on and ride back up to infest the hive.
A screen bottom board also provides ventilation and a cleaner hive allowing colony debris to fall on through. Here in Central Illinois winters are harsh, sometimes getting well below 0 and windy. I do not cover my screen bottom boards. I leave them open all winter to allow ventilation to evaporate the moisture out of my hives. It is not the cold that kills bees, but being cold and wet from their own condensation within the hive from poor ventilation. Screen bottom boards will not get rid of all the mites, but it is one of several approaches that contributes toward keeping mites below the economic threshold.
Secondly, I use drone foundation to lure the mites. You see, as I said earlier, mites like drone cells because the foundress mites have a full 24 days to develop their prodigy since the drone is the longest in the cell. So, you can lure the mites off of your worker cells by placing drone foundation on the outside edges of your brood hive bodies. We sell a one piece drone foundation plastic frame. The cell size is for drone cells so the queen knows to lay only unfertilized eggs producing drones. Then, your mites run to these cells and after they are capped, you pull the frames out, put them in a plastic trash bag, freeze them overnight and your mites are dead. Scratch open the cells and place it back in hive for the bees to clean out, and they will! They get rid of all the mites and dead drones. These frames are a bright lime green so you can easily identify your drone frames. We sell these frames for $4.99 each, much cheaper than chemicals. These can be purchased from our website at: www.honeybeesonline.com under frames and foundation. By scratching the cells open after freezing, it allows you to keep the drawn comb intact, but encourages the bees to clean out the dead mites and drones from the cells. If you scrap the wax completely off, then it just takes more time for the bees to draw it out again.
Thirdly, small cell foundation. I'll skip small cell foundation, because it is not a for sure thing and it should be tried only by very experienced beekeepers. It has to do with bee regression and let's just say that's a whole different lesson. But many claim that by using 4.9 mm cell size foundation, the cells are capped a day sooner, throwing off the mite's cycle and not allowing them to get in on time. Some studies have shown this not to be effective, while other studies show it helps control mites.
Fourthly, work is underway to produce a queen that is so hygienic that her daughters might have the characteristic of detecting a foundress mite, opening the cell and dragging the pupae and mites out before they reproduce. I have attended a conference where this was discussed and the results were shared. It is promising! We may not have to wait, as some suggest that bees are now becoming more aware of mites and are actually taking them out of the hive.
Again, if you find you have a queen and her daughters are keeping mites out of the hive, then that is good queen stock to breed from!
Finally, the answer to all colony problems in my opinion is to keep strong colonies. A strong colony avoids most diseases and pests.
When your supers are off of your hive, powdered sugar dropped in the deep hive bodies can be very effective at controlling mites. For a complete lesson on how to apply the powdered sugar drop, check out our lesson at the link below:
http://basicbeekeeping.blogspot.com/search?q=powdered+sugar
When using powdered sugar, the bees actually clean each other off, and mites go too. And mites get the sugar in their suction cups and can't hang on any more and fall out too! It is impressive.
There you have it! Some natural ways and IPM ways to manage your hives and keep mites from destroying your hive.
I've been working on several more lessons at the same time I've written this one. The next one will be on record keeping. A failure to keep beekeeping logs can result in the failure of your hives.
Remember, call in your hive orders as soon as possible so you can get your equipment on hand soon. So call us for your hive order or bee order. Call us between 9am - 5pm Central Time. We'll be happy to help you get what you need to start keeping bees.

We have lots of hives listed at our main website at:
www.honeybeesonline.com We'd love to earn your business.

Remember... BEE-HAVE Yourself!!

David & Sheri Burns
217-427-2678
Long Lane Honey Bee Farms

Beekeeping In September

There is a lot of work to be done in the month of September. Over the last few weeks, we have been sprinkling powdered sugar in the hives. The bees become covered with this dusty sugar, and so in an effort to clean themselves up, they also clean off the mites. Mites to a bee are like fleas on a dog. Only the mites do more damage to the overall health of a hive if they get out of control. There is research being conducted that may suggest that mites contribute to the cause of CCD, Colony Collapse Disorder. So, to keep them under control, we dust our hives with powdered sugar.

The Procedure We Use To Dust For Mites

Sometimes we grind our own powdered sugar. This can be accomplished either in a coffee grinder or a blender. You can only grind a small amount at a time, so we find it easier to go to the local grocery store and buy the powdered sugar. Even though it contains some corn starch, this small amount isn't suppose to bother the bees.

It is important to pour at least 1 cup of powdered sugar over the top of the frames of each hive body full of bees. Then, we use a bee brush or our gloves to sweep the sugar down between the frames. Some people dust each side of the individual frames, but I don't like putting sugar down into the cells that are uncapped. 1 cup per hive body is plenty, though some people use two cups.

If you noticed in the picture above, we've made a framed screen so that we can lay the screen onto the top of a hive body, then pour sugar onto the screen. This holds the bees down while we spread the powdered sugar around. Then we remove the screen and sweep the remaining sugar down between the frames. We then add the next hive body on top and repeat the process.

Speaking of repeating the process, this "sugar drop" has to be repeated on exact day, in three consecutive weeks. In other words, for three Monday in row, or three Saturdays in a row...whatever day you did the first drop. This consecutive treatment allows you to break the mite cycle and kill those which may have been in the sealed brood chambers.

Some good advice is to use LOTS OF SMOKE! Especially if the weather is adverse or your bees are adverse!

Tomorrow, we'll go inside the honey room and show the progress we've made here, and continue the work, now that the honey production is over for the year.