As the traffic is a tad light at the moment, I thought I'd keep you guys up to speed on one of several developments I'm currently working on ...
I'm an enthusiast of Vapourised Oxalic Acid for keeping Varroa mites in check, and for those who are new to this - the principle is very simple: Oxalic Acid Dihydrate is heated until it sublimes (i.e. passes directly from the solid phase to the gaseous phase, without becoming liquid in-between) and, as a gas the molecules begin to spread further apart from each other. Then, having left the heat of the vapouriser, those molecules cool down and so become solid again - but - as they are now spread-out so far apart, what results is an aerosol of fine micro-crystalline
DUST (and
not vapour). And it is this Oxalic Acid dust which proceeds to reek havoc upon the Varroa mite, but thankfully has no discernible effect upon the bees.
Ok - so how does one go about vapourising Oxalic Acid ? Well, there are numerous devices on the market, ranging from the 'Varrox' (the original applicator, ideal for the hobbyist, which runs from a 12 volt lead-acid battery), right up to complex professional multi-dosing systems which require both generators and compressors, and which cost thousands of pounds/dollars.
Perhaps the most cost-effective and efficient vapourisers currently available are the inverting band-heater vapouriser designs, which are fairly new to the market. These can dose beehives every couple of minutes, but do cost a few hundred dollars, which is a large outlay for someone with a dozen hives or less. For those people who are handy at DIY however, there is a Build-It-Yourself option available, details of which can be found at:
https://www.beesource.com/threads/band-heater-vaporizer.332394/Although inverting band-heater vapourisers are high performers, they do - like most other hand-held vapourisers - suffer from a couple of undesirable features. The first of these is that during their use the operator is 'up close and personal' with a very nasty chemical. There
shouldn't be any problems if all goes according to plan - but what if something should go wrong ?
Secondly, to stand next to a beehive motionless, holding a piece of equipment in place for two or three minutes may not sound like much of an ordeal, but after several dozen hives ? Suppose you have thirty hives, that's 90 minutes standing there motionless like a dummy - albeit 90 minutes spread out over two hours or more. Personally, I don't think that's a very good use of a beekeeper's time.
The underlying principle behind every vapouriser design I've yet seen is the same: there is but one vapouriser, and the operator moves from hive to hive, dosing just the one hive at a time. But what happens if a fault with that vapouriser should develop ?
The approach I'm currently adopting is different, in that multiple vapourisers (which are exceedingly cheap to make) are used simultaneously - so that 4 or even 8 vapourisers are inserted into beehives, a button is pressed, at which point the operator becomes free to then walk-away to do something else, and return in half an hour or so to repeat the process with yet another 4 or 8 hives. No standing about like a dummy, and no standing 'up close and personal' with the equipment while it's being used.
However,
do be aware that there's a catch - in that this system may not be suitable for everybody, and in particular is only really suitable for someone who builds their own equipment, as a special base is required. And my next post contains details of such a base.
LJ