# Timing of ApiGuard treatment for winter bees



## jhinshaw (Aug 14, 2014)

I haven't put my sticky paper down yet to see what the count is but I'm pretty sure my productive hive is carrying a high varroa load. They have a number of general health problems (mild dysentery, allowed wax moth in honey supers) in spite of being strong in numbers so I'm thinking I'm going to find mites at the heart of the problem. Also, if I take pictures of the inspections I have no problems playing the mite spotting game (not science, I know). 

So my question is: if I'm using ApiGuard to treat when would be the best time to apply if I wanted to make sure that the winter bees were the healthiest I could possibly make them? I know it is 2 weeks per treatment so it is a 1 month application and the queen possibly stops laying the first days of each application so I would possibly see two brood breaks. I think it would help if I knew when the last big brood cycles were! LOL. I could work backwards to make sure they were mite-less!


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## michkel (Dec 1, 2012)

I treat in late August/early September here. You still need warm temps for the Apiguard. I time it right after I remove the honey super. I have not noticed any brood breaks, but I tend to stay out of the hive once I start treatment. I also have a screened bottom board, so I put the mite tray back in for treatment.


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## enjambres (Jun 30, 2013)

If you've got a high-ish mite load (or think you do) don't try to game the timing - treat at once!

You're not going to get an effective "brood break" with Apiguard, perhaps at most a pause of a few days that won't matter in the long run. But if you've got a heavy load one or two mites go in to each parasitized cell and two to four emerge, so you may be doubling the mites at good rate.

You also should treat sooner rather than later,, so that if the first treatment doesn't do the trick you have enough time to wait a bit before you try something else before it becomes too cold.

Once you've got the mites under control for a period of time, then you can study you bee life cycle in your local area and try to choose the optimal window(s) for treatment in the future. (For instance I try to arrange things so I don't need to treat in the mid/late spring when I might be cooking up new queens.) But you can't do that kind annual fine tuning until your mite levels are under control, more or less all the time. (And you are monitoring all the time, in one way or another, so an unexpected change can't sneak up on you.)

Enj.


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## libhart (Apr 22, 2010)

I forget who said/wrote it, I want to say Kim Flottum....that a good goal to shoot for is that your winter bees grandmothers are quite healthy (where grandmothers aren't genetic, but the bees that raise the bees that raise the winter bees). Backing up those generations in my area, that means I try to be as mite-free as possible in mid-August. That doesn't necessarily mean start treating in mid-August. It's all product dependent. I want the treatment to be finished, meaning complete and as effective as possible, in mid-August. I treat with MAQS, so I'm looking in the beginning of August for good weather days (not crazy hot). If I treated with thymol or amitraz, I'd be looking at the labels and then working backward as many days as the treatment takes. This may run into when supers are still on, so that's no good with those products and has to be taken into account. Anyway, that's how I'm timing treatment. Pick a goal of mite-freeness and work backwards depending on the treatment you want to use.


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## jhinshaw (Aug 14, 2014)

libhart said:


> I forget who said/wrote it, I want to say Kim Flottum....that a good goal to shoot for is that your winter bees grandmothers are quite healthy (where grandmothers aren't genetic, but the bees that raise the bees that raise the winter bees). Backing up those generations in my area, that means I try to be as mite-free as possible in mid-August. That doesn't necessarily mean start treating in mid-August. It's all product dependent. I want the treatment to be finished, meaning complete and as effective as possible, in mid-August. I treat with MAQS, so I'm looking in the beginning of August for good weather days (not crazy hot). If I treated with thymol or amitraz, I'd be looking at the labels and then working backward as many days as the treatment takes. This may run into when supers are still on, so that's no good with those products and has to be taken into account. Anyway, that's how I'm timing treatment. Pick a goal of mite-freeness and work backwards depending on the treatment you want to use.


This makes sense. I don't think I can achieve this with Apiguard since it is listed at 85-95% effective over the course of 4 weeks which would put me finishing up around early September but that might be as good as I can get...and not too bad considering the goldenrod flow will still be on till (I believe) end of September. 

That actually brings me to my other question about timing. If treatment is not timed to follow the end of the last nectar flow (barring I think oxalic drip method maybe), do the bees not carry in additional mites from say working the last month of goldenrod? In my head I'm thinking I go through a month of treatment and end in September, then the bees work the goldenrod for a month and bring in new piles of mites right before winter lol. Just curious. I treated last year before goldenrod and didn't have any issues but then they were a package so things were a bit different...


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## jhinshaw (Aug 14, 2014)

Also, not to get too technical here, I've been considering not using the sticky board altogether because I can't figure out how to get a meaningful measurement with it. The typical arguments are that mite drop varies by season and that a 40 count mite drop from a nuc is not the same as a 40 count in a 3 deep so it is about the ratio of mites with respect to the season...from what I understand. 

At this stage I know what my hive weighs and the average number of brood frames but no way to really decide what is the RIGHT mite load to begin treatment based on those numbers and with relation to the season. I'm sure this is a subject of constant debate but I'm really interested in having a better handle on my hive's health.


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## libhart (Apr 22, 2010)

I don't really think the bees are going to be bringing in enormous levels of mites in that final month or two. I would think that many immigrant mites are brought in by drones, and drones are starting to be not as accepted as the year winds down. Those that did come in on workers might be able to reproduce, but could never push the levels back to what's required to really harm the population in those last few brood cycles before the queen really shuts down.

You are correct in that mite load is really about percentages. The number of mites per X number of bees. In the early to mid spring you will have mites and they are reproducing, but the queen is laying faster than they are, and the bountifulness of drones being raised means mite damage is almost all in the drones which is not very damaging to a colony. As the year goes on and we pass the summer solstice, the queen is going to slow down and will also lay fewer drones. You're still losing bees through normal attrition of old foragers so your overall population drops, but guess what, all those mites are still in there. As the bee population slowly drops, the percentage of mites-to-bees starts to go up quickly. Fewer drones being raised means all those mites are now heading into worker cells and damaging the lifeblood of the hive. Randy Oliver has a great graph of this. Notice how the total mites line rises but it doesn't really look that dramatic. But then the fact that the bee population is following its normal yearly trend in the late summer and early fall makes that "Mites per 300 bees" line go through the roof! Knock the mites back to almost nil and the bees will do much better even with a few mites finding their way back in. 

http://scientificbeekeeping.com/scibeeimages/brasstacks-graph1.png

From this article: http://scientificbeekeeping.com/sick-bees-part-12-varroa-management-getting-down-to-brass-tacks/


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## jhinshaw (Aug 14, 2014)

libhart said:


> I don't really think the bees are going to be bringing in enormous levels of mites in that final month or two. I would think that many immigrant mites are brought in by drones, and drones are starting to be not as accepted as the year winds down. Those that did come in on workers might be able to reproduce, but could never push the levels back to what's required to really harm the population in those last few brood cycles before the queen really shuts down.
> 
> You are correct in that mite load is really about percentages. The number of mites per X number of bees. In the early to mid spring you will have mites and they are reproducing, but the queen is laying faster than they are, and the bountifulness of drones being raised means mite damage is almost all in the drones which is not very damaging to a colony. As the year goes on and we pass the summer solstice, the queen is going to slow down and will also lay fewer drones. You're still losing bees through normal attrition of old foragers so your overall population drops, but guess what, all those mites are still in there. As the bee population slowly drops, the percentage of mites-to-bees starts to go up quickly. Fewer drones being raised means all those mites are now heading into worker cells and damaging the lifeblood of the hive. Randy Oliver has a great graph of this. Notice how the total mites line rises but it doesn't really look that dramatic. But then the fact that the bee population is following its normal yearly trend in the late summer and early fall makes that "Mites per 300 bees" line go through the roof! Knock the mites back to almost nil and the bees will do much better even with a few mites finding their way back in.
> 
> ...


Maybe I need a little help with this graph! haha. A couple things...I don't see the triangles represented on the graph and am not sure how they fit in. I may be misunderstanding that part. Also I don't understand how they are representing the mites/300 bees on this same graph unless 300 bees is also a half cup? Even still I am not seeing it! lol. But thank you very much. This is very helpful.


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## jhinshaw (Aug 14, 2014)

I was looking for a way to count my hive population and stumbled upon a traffic calculator! It's a little Arduino device. Doesn't help with a bee count but I thought it would be worth sharing! 

http://www.instructables.com/id/Honey-Bee-Counter/


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## libhart (Apr 22, 2010)

jhinshaw said:


> Maybe I need a little help with this graph! haha. A couple things...I don't see the triangles represented on the graph and am not sure how they fit in. I may be misunderstanding that part. Also I don't understand how they are representing the mites/300 bees on this same graph unless 300 bees is also a half cup? Even still I am not seeing it! lol. But thank you very much. This is very helpful.


In the article itself there are many more graphs where the triangles show up as treatments and you can see the modeled effects on the other numbers.

~300 bees is 1/2 cup  so that was just a bit of a mislabel in not using the same descriptive label there. They are in fact the same. Hopefully that clears up the graph and makes apparent the spring->summer and then summer->fall dynamic of mites in your hive. We tend to completely understand that the bee population slowly drops down toward the end of summer but fail to appreciate that the mites don't do this at all...they just keep reproducing.


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