Beemaster's International Beekeeping Forum
BEEKEEPING LEARNING CENTER => NATURAL & ORGANIC BEEKEEPING METHODS => Topic started by: ApisNovus on February 06, 2008, 10:26:01 pm
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This I found in russian website and I am wondering if anyone tried this method.
Pinetree needle powder
Collect fresh green needles from pinetree (cedar is the best) and dry in the oven with temperature 50-60 deg. C (122 - 140 deg F). After that the green (!!!) pinetree leaves (needle) have to be hard and dry. After that, leaves has to be grinde with meatgrinder a few times until yolu get a powder (!!!!) (I think that cofeegrinder would work much better - ApisNovus)
Store this powder in a covered glass jar.
The powder is good agains varoa. Treat hives in early spring during 7-10 days. generosely cover bees with this powder. Motes and tick cant styand smell of pinetree and start moving. Their sucktion cups will be covered with pwder so they will fell down and die.
The advantage of this powder is that it is natural and harmless. You can uncrease effectiveness of this method if you place a small piece of pinetree sap on the top of frames.
guys, what do you think about this method?
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Interesting. I don't know about the effectiveness of it; but it probably wouldn't hurt. I use dried pine needles in my smoker. Wonder if the smoke has any repellent value?
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apinovice
that will dry out and kill any uncapped brood-stick with powdered sugar-RDY-B
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Sooo!! :shock: You're saying that granulated cedar will do for varroa what it does for moths? Cure mites and wax moths with one application? Sounds too good to be credible.
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granulated cedar ?: :? :-D RDY-B
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Any fine powder will work. Flour and powdered sugar are easier to get. :) I know a guy who uses powdered sugar and garlic powder mixed. He's been doing it as his only Varroa treatment for years. Maybe the garlic powder makes them want to get it off more.
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Michael, interesting about the garlic powder inclusion. A course I took about mite controls the fellow indicated that garlic powder was also good, he thought that it caused the odour that knocked the socks off the mites and they got downright annoyed and left, hee, hee :roll: :). But he said to use that too. Have a wonderful and beautiful day, love this life. Cindi
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Cedar works for repelling fleas & moths, it just might work for the mites. One note is that you can't use it in breeding boxes for birds & it's not really good for small rodents or chix...pine works better so I wonder it it would hurt the bee larva?? I don't have bees yet so don't know much..I havea gazillion & 5 cedar trees here tho...
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Cedar boxes don't make any difference with the bees or mites.
Any powder will dry out an kill brood, including sugar or starch if much gets in with the larvae. We really rely on the horizonal cells to keep too much from getting in there.
The pine powder probably works the same way as sugar...to dislodge the mites and to cause grooming.
The advantage of sugar is that I would eat a cup of sugar far quicker than a cup of pine needles. Natural doesn't mean edible or good. (I don't think pine needles are poison, but still....)
Rick
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What if there was a chemical occurring within pine that has a miticide effect ? Just recently I saw a posting on this forum recommending using walnut shavings for smoker fuel and that it had an effect on varroa . There is much research to be done yet , and I am in no position to sacrifice my two hives . This is however interesting . I hope someone can research things like this to the point of a definative conclusion.
---Burl---
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>Cedar works for repelling fleas & moths, it just might work for the mites.
I have some cedar boxes. It doesn't seem to bother the wax moths, or the Varroa mites a bit.
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I have some cedar boxes. It doesn't seem to bother the wax moths, or the Varroa mites a bit.
Doesn't surprise me about the mites but does surprise me in regards to the moths. I tend to see a lot of earwigs, cockroaches, and spiders hanging out between my inner board and outer covers and some orange beetle looking creature always hanging out on the outside of my boxes in the fall. I'm sure you see similar activities with your hives. Do you notice any decrease of other insects taking up residence when using the cedar boxes?
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>Do you notice any decrease of other insects taking up residence when using the cedar boxes?
I never see many insects IN a healthy hive. I do see them on the inner cover etc. but that's not in the box. No, I don't see any difference.
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I have some cedar boxes. It doesn't seem to bother the wax moths, or the Varroa mites a bit.
red cedar or aromatic?
red usually has a consistent color where as the aromatic is usually a bright pink and somewhat splotchy or streaked with tan
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>red cedar or aromatic?
I have made them from both. I was a carpenter and cedar siding scraps were more common than aromatic cedar scraps, but I had both.
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well, that's one more experiment I wont be wasting cedar on
I have about a thousand of the trees and a saw mill
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Here lizard,lizard,lizard. They are all over and in and out of my boxes. never see the bees bother them or ver visa. :roll: :)doak
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Flour and powdered sugar are easier to get. :)
Easier to get HERE. The last time I was in Russia there was no sugar around. They offered us jam to sweeten our tea :'( I passed :roll:
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The last time I was in Russia there was no sugar around. They offered us jam to sweeten our tea
He, he, it seems that Cuba is not sending sugar to Russia since the Perestroiska. :shock:
(What a countries all around the world!)
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FYI: The use of natural oils and other substances in the pursuit of mite control in honey bee colonies. This document mainly covers the calibration of LD 50 doses of essential oils with respect to honey bees.
David A. Cushman's web site
http://www.dave-cushman.net/bee/naturaloils.html
Preliminary results
Control cages that were fed sugar syrup had an average of 2 dead bees over 72 hours. Bees fed the ethyl alcohol sandwich without any oils had an average of 3.5 dead bees over 72 hours. Thus, the physical effects of force feeding were minimal and the ethyl alcohol we used had little toxicity for the bees.
The following is a list of the approximate LD 50's for each of the oils tested together with menthol from a previous experiment.
Substance LD 50
Menthol unable to cause mortality with highest doses administrable [1]
Cinnamon oil 150 ppm
Clove oil 200 ppm
Pinene 1500 ppm
Thymol 100 ppm
Oil of wintergreen 500 ppm.
Neem oil from 100 ppm to 1000 ppm (the bees did not take well to being fed Neem oil)
Conclusions
Establishing the toxicity of these potentially useful botanicals is an important step to understanding dosage response, and the risks of administering these materials orally to bees for their protection against mites. Although a given compound may be efficacious against mites, if its toxicity to bees is high then there is great risk in using it.
Materials such as thymol may continue to be useful as fumigants and in topical application, but would have to be used with care as an oral medicament. Pinene, on the other hand, may be valuable in killing mites on and in the bodies of honeybees by its relatively low toxicity to bees when they ingest it.
If you do a web search on Pinene you are in for a surprise!
Regards,
Ernie
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Interesting idea.
I wonder if cedar pollen would work also? Cedar shavings are what we use for dags to run off fleas. Cedar trees are almost done pollinating, perhaps should gather some and try.
Scadsobees pine needles aren't poison. I drink pine needle and cedar tea often for vitamin c and minerals. Just be sure you know difference between cedar and juniper which is a non native plant and supposed to be poison.
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Any fine powder will work. Flour and powdered sugar are easier to get. :) I know a guy who uses powdered sugar and garlic powder mixed. He's been doing it as his only Varroa treatment for years. Maybe the garlic powder makes them want to get it off more.
Don't varroa suck blood?
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The advantage of this powder is that it is natural and harmless.
I'm all for natural and all for harmless, but natural does not necessarily equal harmless...
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In Georgia - if you have land with a lot of pine tree's you have a lot more ticks than if you have land with lots of hardwoods. I'm not sure there is a logical relationship, but if bugs in the tick family hate pine so much, then why do they inhabit pine forests at a greater rate than hardwoods?
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I don't know if this is the reason or not but ticks need a place to hide that will brush against animals where they can jump on. Tall grass is a good candidate. But a pine tree would be better than a hard wood because pine branches go right to the ground where as hardwood branches die off because of the lack of light.