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Kill Those Mites—Now.
Ten legs. (Not 8. That’s spiders. And not 6. That’s insects—like your bees.) Flat, roundish body. Brick color. Female (you never see the male). About the size of the head of a pin. Simple name—Varroa. Pretty innocent, isn’t?
Not. NOT!
A few more terms will give a more accurate picture. Scientific name: varroa destructor. Does that sound innocent? How about “parasitic”? And disease? And viruses? And CCD (colony collapse disorder)? Kind of chilling. Apocalyptic.
This little critter is responsible for huge difficulty and damage to the beekeeping industry. It doesn’t matter whether you are a hobby beekeeper with two hives or a commercial beekeeper with 20,000. You can be in America or Germany or Chile or Australia—your bees probably have some. And no matter your status or location you will probably pull your hair about equally.
Varroa isn’t the only problem for beekeepers and laid beside agricultural pesticides (aka neonicotinoids) it would be hard to say which one is the bigger problem. But it is a problem and nobody is exempt.
I’d love to give you a lot of detail about this mighty mite; how it lives and reproduces and what it does to your bees. But for now I’ll let you consult Wikipedia for a fairly good description and photographs. Because of the “emergency” nature of varroa this time of the year, I’ll get right down to business in this post with a few points:
It’s kind of blunt to say but if someone says they have no mites, they’re lying. Probably not intentionally. They just can’t see them.
Bees can develop some immunity to mites. Some colonies seem able to coexist with them without being adversely affected. Others, because of genic traits such as hygienic behavior, reduce the mite load and increase survival. And so the idea has been floated that, “I won’t treat. The colonies that die because of mites aren’t resistant. The ones that don’t die are survivors. We’ll all be better in the long run to not treat.” Myth. While there is some truth to that and if you can breed from survivor colonies or maintain hygienic stock you will have better bees, to do nothing about mites is poor citizenship. If the mites would die when the bees dies that might be a good idea. But since that is not the case, every time a colony dies, that colony’s mites go next door and make life miserable of the next colony or the next-door neighbor’s bees. And so…
Checkmite and Apistan aren’t good ideas. But there are effective options. Apivar is a hard chemical that still has good effectiveness and low negative effects on bees. But more advisable is formic (FormicPro) and oxalic acid (ApiBioxal). Drone removal is completely safe as is of summer splitting that forces them to make their own queen. No matter the option, the important thing is to do something, not nothing.
Because treatment has a labor and monetary expenditure and depending on what you use, there is a negative consequence for the bees themselves, you don’t want to be treating haphazardly. But overwintered colonies should be checked and, if need be, treated early in the spring—as early as April. Most likely if they are not treated until June or July, you probably have living dead colonies—an accident (or disaster) waiting to happen.
Nucleus colonies or package bees can wait longer—into July. But don’t assume. Check periodically and treat if needed.
Sugar roll and alcohol wash instructions give a threshold of three mites per 100. More than that, treat. However, the lower the mite load, the better. Because mites reproduce exponentially, what seems an acceptable threshold in June can quickly become unacceptable in July. If you can keep the mite load low early and maintain that all season, winter survivability is greatly increase. So, while you can’t have zero mites, the lower you can keep the numbers, the better. One commercial beekeeper is starting to treat with oxalic acid every week for ten months. Another one is doing a course of oxalic one week apart for three weeks. It kills mites and seems to have no adverse effects on bees. Might seem a bit extreme, but the point is, get those mites dead.
We’ll look at these the next time.
Keeping bees means getting rid of mites. Early.
