# Brood Break How-to



## Brad Bee (Apr 15, 2013)

Leave them queenless until you can make them hopelessly queenless by removing any queen cells started from the old queens eggs. Seven days should do it, but waiting 9 days to make the queen cells easier to spot won't hurt anything. Just shake all the bees off all the frames to make sure you cut out every single queen cell. If you're putting a mated queen in, you won't be anywhere close to the time needed to have laying workers.


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## pink bee man (Feb 24, 2015)

I think that would be a whole brood cycle if u mean starving out the mites did it once the hive out grew one next to it after it shed the pest!


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## NewbeeInNH (Jul 10, 2012)

The best way to do a brood break, in my opinion, is to let them raise their own queens. That guarantees a nice, what is it, 30 day brood free period?


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## johnmcda (Aug 10, 2015)

Ditto on raising their own queen. This will guarantee the brood break you want to control the mites. You can then pinch the new queen when you get the VHS queen you want. Also, you may consider using Apivar instead of MAQS. Apivar kills mites. You just stick the strip in the brood nest and leave it 42 days. I use OAV in fall and winter when there is little brood.


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## beepro (Dec 31, 2012)

I think the term is VSH, varroa sensitive hygienic.
And you don't pinch the new queen either. You set the old
queen aside in her own little nuc. This is so that in case
the new queen did not make it you still have a back up unless
you order 2 vsh queens. 
I would treat the old hive first before putting in the new queen.
Do this 2-3 weeks before the new queen arrives. Actually now is
the time to get rid of the mites in the early Spring time before
the flow is on. Then you can requeen later in July. 
My strategy is a bit different. I treated with oav early in late Jan. before the
build up. Grafted from the survivor breeder queen. Then collected my honey before the summer dearth. 
And now ordered a vsh queen to graft and requeen all of my hives. Sell off all the survivor daughters.
This way 99.99% of the mites are gone when the new survivor daughter queens started laying. So one round for the
new survivors and another round for the vsh daughter queens. You may not have
this option so I would say to requeen now with the vsh after a few round of treatments.
Waiting until July is too late because you also want to evaluate the vsh bees too. In a shorter season climate it is
better to do things ahead of time. Vsh bees sometimes will take longer to build up because pulling larvae out will
interrupt the hive population too.


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## libhart (Apr 22, 2010)

NewbeeInNH said:


> That guarantees a nice, what is it, 30 day brood free period?


I'm never sure of people's math on this. Catch me if I'm wrong but it's no where near 30 days.

Day 0: Remove a queen that was just laying 5 minutes ago. Some are reasonably going to be drones. Call this t like NASA. 
t+12hrs: Your bees have chosen a young larvae to raise into a queen. This means that egg was laid 3 days ago, t-3 days.
t+3 days: The last of the original queen's eggs hatch, just becoming larvae now.
t+5 days: The queen cell is capped because it's 8 days from when that egg was laid until it's capped, and that egg was laid at t-3 days.
t+9 days: The original queen's last eggs laid are now capped. Mites are in there. Not even close to broodless yet.
t+13 days: The new queen emerges.
t+17->21 days: New queen's mating flight (assuming happy path for the weather).
t+24 days: Last of the original queen's eggs eclose as adult drone bees. NOW you're broodless.
t+23->28 days: New queen begins laying well.
t+34->37 days: First of the new queen's larvae are capped.

If that's all correct (someone check me) then you have about 10 to 14 days of having no capped brood. Maybe my definition is wrong and broodless means no new brood being capped. If that's the definition then it is around 30 days. It's true that during that period, phoretic mites have no new place to go, but you have a steady supply of mites eclosing with your adult bees, especially your drones.


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## NewbeeInNH (Jul 10, 2012)

libhart, I thought about that. But I was thinking 30 days of no new brood. Which factor is more important I really don't know. Once cells are capped, do mites continue their reproduction? How much does that factor in when adult bees are still carrying around the last brood cycle's mites? Yup, it gets fuzzy, maybe others will chime in.


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## libhart (Apr 22, 2010)

Margot1d said:


> I treated with MAQS and, as usual, it has not helped much.


Maybe the weather up there is more different than I think from down here, but when did you find at least 3 if not 4+ days of weather when the temps were inside the labelled temps for MAQS?


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## libhart (Apr 22, 2010)

NewbeeInNH said:


> Once cells are capped, do mites continue their reproduction?


You better believe it. That's how they reproduce. A mated female mite goes into a cell before it's capped and hides in the brood food under the larva. Once capped, she comes out from under the lays eggs in the cell with the bee larva/pupa. Those eggs hatch, feed on the larva, and mate with each other (usually one male mating with 3-4 female sisters). When the bee ecloses, those females come out with the bee, the male doesn't survive. On avg, a single mother mite will produce 1-2 new mated females in worker brood, 2-3 in drone brood, and she herself will eclose with the bee to do it again. So all that capped brood brings along a lot of mite potential regardless of the presence or state of the queen on the outside.


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## NewbeeInNH (Jul 10, 2012)

It seems like, and maybe I'm wrong, that you would have to figure that 30 days between egg cycles (the brood break) would have to make a difference, even if there is brood in various stages for much of that time.


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## jwcarlson (Feb 14, 2014)

Is there any sort of study or anything other than anecdotal evidence for the use of brood breaks as actually decreasing the mite load appreciably? It certainly shifts the peak population out a bit, but I think the brood break's effectiveness isn't the actual break in brood... but instead the resultant pile of mites and move into the first batch of capped brood after. And the dead/dying larva/pupae associated with that surge. Even in 5 frame nucs I've seen nearly and entire deep frame of brood chewed out after the mites moved into the larva. 

Here was the beginning. Eventually the entire frame was pretty much chewed out. Not exactly setting up your bees for success...


Because our bees up here in the north have roughly a three month brood break and the mites seem to do just swell up here.


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## NewbeeInNH (Jul 10, 2012)

Well, mite populations are always lowest coming out of winter, rather than in the fall.

I hope brood breaks work because I rely on them heavily.

Never thought to question the dogma.


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## jwcarlson (Feb 14, 2014)

NewbeeInNH said:


> Never thought to question the dogma.


I asked the question awhile back. Admittedly, the phrasing of the question is a bit off... but there might be something useful reading here. Thought I will say that I'm going to have to reread it myself because I don't remember exactly what was said...
http://www.beesource.com/forums/sho...and-brood-breaks-select-for-non-hygienic-bees


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## jbeshearse (Oct 7, 2009)

Figure it this way. On a queen replacement cycle, your hive will be without a laying queen for approximately 25 to 30 days. Thats 25 to 30 days no eggs will be laid. The drones take up to 25 days to emerge. So assume the queen starts laying early (at 25 days) and the last drones emerge at 25 days. That would mean you will be brood less for three days (day 25,26,27). After that the eggs start to hatch out. Realistically you will have closer to 8 days as in my experience I don't see eggs until day 28 to 30. 

For best control if you are going to treat with oxalic, day 26 after queen removal is ideal. All bees emerged, no brood and few if any eggs. This kills most all mites in the hive. You can also treat anytime in the next week as there will be no capped brood which allows better penetration into the cells. 

If if you are going to do a brood break with a purchased queen you do not want to leave a hive queenless that long and risk laying workers. I would do a drone cull at the same time you remove any queen cells. Then add the new queen on day 18 and treat with oxalic on day 25. That way you have left ample time for queen acceptance and a period of time with no capped brood for treatment. You may also want to consider treating a week before queen introduction also, just to kill as many mites as possible. 

Beware, maqs is very detrimental to queens and queen rearing. I would not use it anywhere near a queen replacement regime. 

That said, I do not practice any of the above, I treat with amitraz. 

Just my two cents worth.


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## libhart (Apr 22, 2010)

IMHO, times of zero capped brood mean that all the mites are phoretic and vulnerable. Sure, the bees may groom their levels down a bit, but the real benefit to me is that it gives me a chance to knock them down with a single treatment. If the hive truly has 0 capped brood, a single OAV treatment will smack really put a hammer to them. When they're hiding under caps then it means 3 treatments a week apart. So I think the break is a tool to give me an advantage and upper hand, but not the treatment itself.


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## NewbeeInNH (Jul 10, 2012)

Well, I'd never heard of OTS before - I made all my new hives last year from swarm cells which unfortunately were so numerous I didn't have to do anything else to get them - but the thought that brood breaks don't exactly count as a mite treatment is hard to digest, a 180 turn in thought. Almost borders on heresy. I'll have to hear that 5 or more times from other sources before I start to believe it. Especially the posts that say a brood break is actually a handicap to a colony's health. 

Coconut oil used to be bad for you, now it's good type of thing.


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## FlowerPlanter (Aug 3, 2011)

Did you ever get the results back from the lab?

http://www.beesource.com/forums/showthread.php?302624-When-to-Call-it-Quits&p=1154310#post1154310

http://www.beesource.com/forums/sho...king-EFB-Please-Confirm&p=1266312#post1266312

>My hives came through winter with a lot of mites. I treated with MAQS and, as usual, it has not helped much.

Treating for mites will not cure EFB and often they have a low mite count because of the disease. 

Requeening may or may not work and not because of VHS, which has been proven not help with EFB, but does help with AFB. 

G. F. White wrote this in 1920, and it is still very accurate even today, this also puts to rest much of the myths about EFB like "brood break" "contaminated equipment" "goes away in a flow" "only in the spring" "feed them and it goes away" "lack of protein"...;

https://books.google.com/books?hl=e...epage&q=european foulbrood resistance&f=false


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## libhart (Apr 22, 2010)

NewbeeInNH said:


> the thought that brood breaks don't exactly count as a mite treatment is hard to digest, a 180 turn in thought.


I love the heresy mention, made me chuckle. 

I'm with you there. This was the "force" telling me this, and the force is often wrong, at least the one in my head. I decided to model it with BEEHAVE. If you haven't played with BEEHAVE yet and you're a science geek, well, you're missing out. beehave-model.net. It will model the population dynamics of a hive over the course of a year or many years and include things like mites, swarms, mite treatments, feeding, etc.

The modeller doesn't have a brood break option, so I wrote one in. I contacted the author of the model with my changes just to get his opinion and he replied that my changes seemed solid for what I wanted to model. I ran the model for 270 days starting at January 1 with 100 mites and 20K bees which seemed reasonable. I extracted the data so I could put the numbers from the different plots in the tool on the same plot for comparison. A brood break does in fact make a large difference. Unfortunately, at least according to the modeller, it doesn't result in enough of a knockdown to where I'd really want to count on it as my treatment method. That's just me personally. As beekeeping is local, mites too are local. So if you can do this and use it as your treatment method, that's great and I'm jealous. But where I am, right now we have little to no chance of getting bees through a winter that are coming into August with a 3%+ mite load. In my area, as the bee population drops from there, the infestation level goes through the roof, and the winter bees emerge with such high viral loads that they'll rarely make it.


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## jbeshearse (Oct 7, 2009)

Consider it this way. A brood break in effect eliminates between 25,000 to 40,000 bees from your hive population if it is forced during a time when the queen would be laying flat out. ( 25 days of lost eggs at 1000 to 1500 eggs per day. 

the charts basically show that as the population without a brood break peaks at around 40k verses 25k with a break.


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## jwcarlson (Feb 14, 2014)

libhart said:


> I love the heresy mention, made me chuckle.
> 
> I'm with you there. This was the "force" telling me this, and the force is often wrong, at least the one in my head. I decided to model it with BEEHAVE. If you haven't played with BEEHAVE yet and you're a science geek, well, you're missing out. beehave-model.net. It will model the population dynamics of a hive over the course of a year or many years and include things like mites, swarms, mite treatments, feeding, etc.
> 
> ...


Why does the mite population stay flat in the "brood break" model even though brood is still being actively reared, capped, and emerging during day 150-172ish? Actually, it looks like it goes down a little bit...


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## challenger (May 27, 2009)

Why not try the formic on meat pads? 50% solution dosed at 2ml per frame of bees. Penetrates cappings and kills the male mite so there is no reproduction. Also kills phoretics as well obviously.
I've never understood beekeeping in urban areas anyway. There is simply not enough forage in Brooklyn. I guess maybe you are feeding a lot?


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## Groundhwg (Jan 28, 2016)

libhart said:


> IMHO, times of zero capped brood mean that all the mites are phoretic and vulnerable. Sure, the bees may groom their levels down a bit, but the real benefit to me is that it gives me a chance to knock them down with a single treatment. If the hive truly has 0 capped brood, a single OAV treatment will smack really put a hammer to them. When they're hiding under caps then it means 3 treatments a week apart. So I think the break is a tool to give me an advantage and upper hand, but not the treatment itself.


Agree, let the queen keep laying and raising/making brood and just do the OAV in 3 treatments if capped brood is present.


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## Margot1d (Jun 23, 2012)

jbeshearse said:


> Figure it this way. On a queen replacement cycle, your hive will be without a laying queen for approximately 25 to 30 days. Thats 25 to 30 days no eggs will be laid. The drones take up to 25 days to emerge. So assume the queen starts laying early (at 25 days) and the last drones emerge at 25 days. That would mean you will be brood less for three days (day 25,26,27). After that the eggs start to hatch out. Realistically you will have closer to 8 days as in my experience I don't see eggs until day 28 to 30.
> 
> For best control if you are going to treat with oxalic, day 26 after queen removal is ideal. All bees emerged, no brood and few if any eggs. This kills most all mites in the hive. You can also treat anytime in the next week as there will be no capped brood which allows better penetration into the cells.
> 
> ...


Hey, Sorry I have been checked out, jut reading this. Gosh everything with bees gets so complicated. Jbeshearse, this is helpful. I will probably try to do something like this. I can not do oxalic vapor only dribble. I assume that's also fine.


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## clyderoad (Jun 10, 2012)

Margot1d said:


> My hives came through winter with a lot of mites. I treated with MAQS and, as usual, it has not helped much.


My bet is the MAQS worked just fine, it was the warm fall weather through January that gave the mites 2+ months of additional brood to
reproduce on this last fall/winter. 
The bees probably needed a treatment in Nov. and/or late January, depending on what was going to be used. More like a southern fall season for us last year so had to adapt treatment regime.


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## Margot1d (Jun 23, 2012)

So I'm getting ready to put my plan into action. I read up on Scientific Beekeeping and I was going to follow Randy Oliver's advice of caging the queen and not removing her completely. He says in his power point to cage the old queen for two weeks, then remove her and introduce the new queen, 5 days later, treat with oxalic. I was looking at Bush's bee math and this does not really add up. !4+5=19 which would leave me with capped worker and definitely capped drone brood. I think now I am a little off, I was going to cage today and requeen on the 27/28th. I should have listened to jbeshearse.


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## crofter (May 5, 2011)

I agree with Jbsehearse re the possible impact on population; I would add that the timing is important in regard to your local weather and flow pattern. Timing of the brood break will make a large difference in the potential influence on the population. I had one colony go through a supercedure / brood break starting around the third week of May and it really hurt honey production compared to other hives. If I were to instigate a queen replacement _now_ when they are starting to back a way off on brood production it would not have very serious affects.

I think Carni and Russian bees come close to naturally giving themselves brood breaks; Italians not so much! Bees with a strong grooming instinct play havoc with the mites that are forced to remain phoretic and it would be my guess that even a less than total brood free period would be worth while. The reported variation in effectiveness could be influenced by bee type and the degree of mite in drift from other colonies. 

I dont deliberately do brood breaks but if I were determined to attempt treatment free status I would. My present isolation from other bees and having probably fairly mite resistant bees makes varroa treatment pretty relaxed for me.


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## libhart (Apr 22, 2010)

Randy O's preferred method of applying OA is a dribble that really only works well on completely broodless bees (no capped). He has the winter weather to be able to do that. At this link he says 14 days caged, then broodless 6 days after that and for about 3 days. But you're right, taking into account drones would mean you'd have to keep the queen caged a few days longer.

http://scientificbeekeeping.com/oxalic-dribble-tips/

From what I understand, if you vaporize the OA it has a longer action in the hive since the vapor condenses on all the surfaces. In that case, you could probably cage for 16 days and w/a OA vapor at say, day 22, you'd still be catching a lot of mites at day 24-25 even though you'd be seeing the initial post-cage capped brood at that point.


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## beepro (Dec 31, 2012)

And if you run a double hive set up then oav from the top too.
Because it is easier to cover the entire single box, having a double will
not be as effective on the free running mites at the upper box. You can also
use a frame cage to house the queen temporarily while doing the oav with the
cage remove from the hive on a short time.


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## pink bee man (Feb 24, 2015)

Margot1d said:


> My hives came through winter with a lot of mites. I treated with MAQS and, as usual, it has not helped much. I am planning on requeening my hives with VHS queens from Full Bloom Apiaries. I would also like to do a brood break. My question is how long should I wait between killing the old queens and putting in the new queens? I will of course remove queen cells. What is the ideal time to wait for a mite reduction, before laying workers set in. I am planning on doing it in mid July.


It takes quite a few days for a laying worker to appear on seen ,some thing no one wants ,as for hive the workers will notice queen gone in just less than hour ,or min. Requeen seconded day ,after old queen is squashed ,and do that rite in hive so they will fined her! They will except any thing almost at that point. 

No matter what happens they usually work it out!


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## Margot1d (Jun 23, 2012)

I am revisiting this because I had so many things go wrong with my plan that I don't think I am going to learn much if I don't get some input. 

Some history, I caged the queens and waited 2-3 weeks. I removed the caged queens and installed new queens. During this process I treated with oxalic vapor.

My main issue was that hives made new queens during the brood break. I can not figure out how this happened because they would have had to start the cells less then four days after the queen was caged. None the less, I keep going in hives and finding unmarked queens, rather then the marked queens that I added. They did not look like they were going to get accepted when I put them in. Next time I will use push in cages and I put some in nucs. I know that there were not two queens originally because there was a brood break of just shy of a month.

Can someone please tell me how common this is, for a hive to make new queens when you cage the original queen. Should I have just offed the queens, given them a month and then added new queens to the hives that didn't get mated?


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## beepro (Dec 31, 2012)

Raising their own queens depend on the seasons. 
When you caged the queen her scent will not travel to the other side of
the hive. The result is a queen cell on that frame when eggs/young larvae are present. 
Using a push in cage will not affect them either as you're holding the queen at the same location.
They still will make the new cell if they wanted to. In 2 weeks time they will have a newly emerged
queen. The bees also hide some eggs, somehow delaying it for one week before turning it into a viable queen
cell. I have observed this issue before but cannot be precise enough to document it.


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## Margot1d (Jun 23, 2012)

Thank you bee pro for confirming my suspicions. I guess I am not going crazy after all.


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## beepro (Dec 31, 2012)

In my little bee experiment I also found out that using a strong 1st year queen will be less
likely for them to make another queen even though you had caged the old queen. My method is
not the only way for this to work. I'm sure others have already came up with a better method for a brood
break. I use a QE inside a frame that is lined with the pink foam and some plastic queen cups that
turn into the worker cells. No wax comb cells inside for the queen to lay. If she want to lay then the plastic
cups are there. The workers can still come in and out through the QE for some scent exchange. And since this is
a newly mated queen they will be less likely to make the queen cells as I only use the strong scent queen. After the last brood frame emerged you can use the oav on them on a schedule. Even if they made another queen you can still save the old one inside the QE frame. Now you have a new mated queen for sale or use for a late split. I've only shown my QE frame once here but never went into details on how to use it effectively for a brood break before. I don't think this is the only option in doing so. Because I'm still experimenting on my HMOAVG, I need to save some mites over the winter for the Spring oav experiment. If the mite level is low enough then I will not treat for that season.


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