The dialogue:
3. Taking out brood.
This sounds to me like what we call drone trapping in the US, which I already do once my virgin queens are mated. I feel if I'm going to go to the more extreme step of taking out all the brood, than the trapping comb idea is the better option, since it will hopefully catch most of the mites that are on the bees as well.
Consider again about that. If you take out all drone brood the mites are drawn into worker brood which means that they adapt to smaller cell size and might prefer worker brood in future. And diseased worker brood is much more a problem than diseased drones, which will go out and die, the circle of mite multiplying staying mostly in the drone areas until late summer, when the drones are expelled.
A solution might be to have one drone frames in the hive, of which you take out one in spring after mating, freeze, shake out the pupa ( remember, only take out capped brood!) and reuse, taking it out again before drones are expelled by the bees. After shaking out the pupa you can count the mites, which gives you a very good overview on the situation, if you want to do a little research. While this frame management is going on, try to have a little drone brood on every comb, like Dee Luby says. 10% she uses, a corner cut out of the foundation. In that case mites will avoid the worker brood more and you still can keep mite numbers lower by pulling the drone frames besides. A good compromise then, and be aware that the drones are a good help in warming the brood also.
In my case, I have no special drone comb, I have drones on every comb. If I wanted I could just cut away some corners with capped drone cells.
But I never did.
We resistant bees breeders are happy about colonies which breed drones the whole year and I know of no one who uses drone trapping frames or takes out drones at all, so we have trap cells for the mites all year long.That the mites have more young bred in drone cells seem to be a minor problem, I believe that is because bees sacrifice drone pupa whenever a crisis appears, for example in a cold spell or in a drought when they have not enough flow.
Plus: if you have a small amount of drone brood on every comb the bees are concentrating much more on having good worker brood compared to when you take out a whole comb. Which means they fight the mites better by grooming and VSH. They feel no lack of drones then.
And they are more aware of brood disease preventing this by feeding fresh pollen.
Pulling a whole frame might trigger the hive to substitute this frame by breeding drones much more than you want to and neglecting cleaning of the hive.
The same is with harvesting honey. Much better to take out only one frame at a time, so the bees stay content and not at once take away bees from caring for the brood and cleaning the hive to force them to be foragers, feeling a lack of stores.
4. Trapping comb
Okay, so this is the one I'm particularly interested in. My biggest question is this: why do you need to have the queen on an excluder frame? If you take out all the brood combs but one, which has older uncapped larva on it, and use that as the trapping comb, and the queen is still loose in the hive and continues to lay, and then you take out the trapping comb once it's capped, won't that work just as well?
Because the phoretic mites are mostly on the nurse bees and waiting for their next chance to jump into open cells.
When more open brood frames are inside the hive the nurse bees will not all visit the caged frame comb but they will care for all open brood.
Aim is, that all nurse bees visit the caged open brood and lure the mites into those cells, which the mites will do, having no alternative.
Compare this to a car wash, the trapping frame washes away the ?dirt? on the bees.
Plus, how will you know if the queen uses only the one comb? She might crossover before she has used the one frame completely and then you have not enough infested cells on this one frame.
Be careful to take the capped frame before it hatches, the infestation on this frame must be terrible. But you have some days.
I plan to construct a trapping frame by using plastic queen excluders, they are easy to form into a ?bag? which you can reuse later.
Another thought:
To find out about resistance you need a monitoring schedule. Mine will be counting mites on the board and watching for deformed bees.
If I see more than three defect bees and more than 30 mites a day on the varroa board I will take action which means trap comb.
This is my threshold, but you have to find your own, it changes from location to location.
A sugar powder shake of the whole hive will give you a picture of the situation, 1/3 of mites are shaken down. This can be of help if you don?t know exactly what to do or if you have no varroa board. I don?t like to kill bees with alcohol shake and I believe alcohol shake to be inaccurate because most beekeepers use bees from honey supers above the excluder, not to kill the queen. But the phoretic mites are mostly on the nurse bees which means you need to find the queen not to endanger her.
So to make an alcohol shake with bees who store honey might give you a total different result than to make it with nurse bees.
Important is that you develop a stock which is not treated by prophylactic managements like drone cutting but left alone completely.
This needs some years. But it works.
Sibylle
Topic: Brood Trapping Varroa Management (Read 5599 times)