# Sticky  Finding Mite Resistance - The Journey



## JRG13

Greetings everyone!

I've been encouraged to create a post to share with everyone on some of what I've been attempting to find and stabilize some mite tolerance and resistance in bees here in Central California. Given the time of year, it seems like a good day to start the discussion and start sharing what I've seen and garner the discussion on developing a pseudo breeding model that might be effective in a high density area of commercial bees. I'll try to keep it as chronological as I can and detail as best I can what's been done and what bees have been tried. I will preface, I will name names, describe my personal experience with said bees, and be as truthful and honest as to what I saw or am seeing. I also do not mean any disrespect to anyone I've gotten bees from as most or all of them have been good bees as far as typical commercial/hobbyist traits go but the main point of discussion will be how well they fared with mites. 

Secondly, I will describe our landscape, it's fairly heavily used for mainly agriculture. I do have a few hives in an urban setting which fare somewhat better as far as forage goes. Typically though, our dearth can start as soon as almond bloom is over if there isn't much wild mustard or radish blooming. Where I keep the bees there isn't much fruit tree production either, so no cherries, plums or citrus, mainly almonds, walnuts, and pistachio, with almonds the only one being any value to the bees. Mustards and radish will carry into April if they're not sprayed out but then farmers start working their fields and planting. Mainly it's tomatoes, field corn, alfalfa, hybrid sunflower seed production, and some safflower. The alfalfa is rarely of any use to the bees as it's cut 6-8 times during the season and doesn't get to bloom very much or for any extended period of time. If I'm lucky, vetch carries into May somewhat and then hopefully I get some starthistle in June/July but it's getting very dry and hot by then as well.  After that it's pretty much a dearth August - December depending on the weather and area, but where my bees are at, it's pretty slim pickings. Also keep in mind, there's 3 commercial yards within a quarter mile area with 30-40 pallets each yard. They are moved in and out for pollinations so they're not always around during the season, but typically they show up at the end of July and stay through January and might be around sporadically March - June.

In the end though, what's the goal of all of this... I'd really love to find some genetics that work well here in Central Valley California for resisting varroa mites. So far it's been very challenging as our mite pressure is very aggressive in terms of growth and virus pressure. Part of it has to do with lack of quality forage throughout the year though. I think the stress from robbing pressure, the heat in the summer, and nutrition take their toll, especially on the longevity of the lives of the worker bees. I do think there's a light at the end of the tunnel though, it may take some time to get there butI'm always up for a good challenge.

I'll post more as time permits, I'll give a little detail on my background and education then move right along into the bees of where I started and where I'm at now.


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## squarepeg

:applause:

i've been following your posts with great interest jrg13. your location certainly has a plethora of challenges for the bees and therefore provides a good opportunity for running comparisons.

this is valuable work and i'm looking forward to what you have to share with us. thank you for taking the initiative to dedicate a thread to your field trials!


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## Fusion_power

/me grabs some popcorn and a drink and sits back to watch.


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## Nordak

Very cool! Looking forward to your chronicle, and thanks for sharing.


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## FlowerPlanter

Good Luck, I hope you have great success.


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## JRG13

Well, lets get back to it. So, a little about me... I grew up here in the Sacramento area, graduated UC Davis with a degree in genetics. Always had an interest in insects and wildlife etc.. could've been an entomology major just as well. Career wise, I started working for a biotech rice company right out of college. I was part of the molecular breeding group, I managed all the plants, ran the nursery, made a lot crosses as well as the lab work side of things. PCR, southern blots, and DNA extraction. Not to get too detailed, but got laid off after 4 years, ended up with Seminis Vegetable seeds in 2004, which was bought by Monsanto in 2006, got laid off there in 2013 when they cancelled all the vegetable biotech, now I'm with Syngenta on the veg seed side managing the California breeding program for tomato after doing wheat for 2 years. 

How did I get into bees... well, one of my favorite fruits are cherries. When I worked rice, our gh owner's family also had a cherry orchard next to the houses and we got spoiled with fresh cherries. They grew bings, brooks, raniers, and burlat was the pollinator. Anyways, at some point I had 34 varieties of cherries in my personal home 'orchard', but fruit set was abysmal. If I was lucky, I'd see a carpenter bee or a single bumble bee working a few flowers during the entire bloom. So in 2012 I had the bright idea to get a beehive to pollinate the trees and the rest is history...

Anyways, onto the first hive.... went onto Craigslist and found one of the many local Russian beekeepers with hives for sale and ended up picking up a double deep 8 frame with probably 14 frames of bees in mid March. He seemed like a nice guy, bees were decent, the only thing he told me to watch for was of course mites. Pretty sure he had been using Apistan, showed me which strips to get when the time came. Got the bees home, after about two weeks the neighbor noticed them and got all upset about them so I ended up having to move them to Woodland where I work to a friends property outside of town. My interest in the bee side of things grew pretty quickly, I was pretty much on youtube and beesource hours on end each day, which I still do. Made some good local friends as well, Ray Marler, Phil Hoffland (Honey-4-All), SoarwithEagles, and even the infamous Keith Jarret. I also jump into the chatroom most evenings and when I started back in 2012 some of the bigger names would be partake like Michael Palmer and the Fatbeeman himself. Fusion Power is also someone I talk to quite a bit on the bees but Ray was kind of my initial mentor and such. If I forgot to mention anyone, I apologize!! 

Anyways, that first hive rolled along quite well, ended up being 4 deeps at some point, two brood boxes, two supers but the mites started getting noticeable in summer and I also picked up another hive in August from another Russian guy that was selling off his 100 hives or so. I ended up trying Hopguard that year on the first hive, pretty much found it worthless and when I put the strips in the bees got very upset and anything the excess fluid from the strips dripped on would end up dead, so if you happened to place the strips on top of your queen.... I knew the first hive was in trouble in late fall but the second hive seemed to be doing alright, but come December it was pretty much down to a few frames of bees and the original hive was down to a few hundred bees and the queen but was still limping along. I think part of my failure in the varroa issue the first year is I did not have a clear plan on what I wanted to do or how to approach it.

That being said, I certainly wasn't ignorant of the issue but I think I had the attitude of 'my bees can't be that bad' and by the time the realization set in that my bees were indeed that bad it was a little too late to do much about it but keep my fingers crossed and hope they make it to spring. At the same time though, I had already started the building blocks of implementing my strategy of bringing in some mite tolerant bees and seeing if they helped with the issue. Discussing options with the guys on Beesource, Glenn Apiaries seemed like the go to place for relatively affordable II VSH queens at the time, but unfortunately at the tail end of 2012 they announced their retirement and closing down the bee breeding program. They did have some breeders available still though and I did end up trying to get a split pulled in December to house one, but the nuc didn't make winter unfortunately. As discouraging and heartbreaking as that was I entered 2013 with plans of expanding and finding some bees that could survive without treatments for varroa.


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## liljake83

following opcorn:


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## Gazelle

Being up in the Chico area,I am all ears!


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## JMHoney

Following as well. I'm on the journey here in Indiana. Been a challenge. Been hard. Has been totally worth the trip.


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## Oldtimer

Hey thanks for posting JRG13 I didn't know all that about you. It's awesome having people on Beesource with qualifications in genetics and solid professional experience in the subject.


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## 1102009

I look forward to your experience! 
All the best to you!


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## AstroBee

Following along. Your location sounds like a very challenging environment! How many colonies are you running?


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## JRG13

Not quite sure on the exact number left, but between 60-70, had about 80 at the high point of the year so not too bad so far for 2016 losses.


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## JWChesnut

Sigh, Glenn Mn-Hyg, my favorite queens ever (and I don't think its just misty nostalgia).

I heard from a couple sources that Tom Glenn has a retirement job running breeding for the Big O outfit... can anyone confirm?


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## Knisely

I'm pulling up a chair. Pass the popcorn, please.


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## JRG13

JW, haven't heard anything about that, but lets move onto 2013...

So, early spring 2013, the original have was barely hanging on but still had a queen and a couple hundred workers, but brood was still in stages of PMS. The second have had gone queenless during winter and was now laying worker. I searched on Craiglist and found someone who was selling his 4 hives for a good price as he had to move and coincidentally he was a Russian guy too. The hives were 2 Kona queens, 1 daughter from one of them and a queen from his buddy who had kept bees TF for 19 years in the area. He managed his mites with powdered sugar in the summer, no chemical treatments and said it worked well for him. The strongest hive was the daughter F1 which was in a single and about 9 frames of bees, the rest were all two deeps and a medium but probably 5-6 framers at the time, mid March. That was pretty much the last time I bought any actual hives or bees, from here on out all I've purchased are queens.


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## JRG13

So that's how 2013 started. I split the hives up between 3 locations, one replaced the lw hive, I shook it out, put the new hive in it's place, all the bees flew back and things got settled in. This was one of the Kona queens. The other Kona queen and the daughter went to Elk Grove and the one from the Russian breeder went to Weimar. All these bees were pretty good bees, but none had a lick of mite resistance in them. The guy who owned them previously must've known how to dust with powdered sugar really well is all I can say....

The daughter queen ended up getting superceded a few weeks in, I removed the first cell I found made a split, here's a pic ,
but 2 weeks later she was still getting replaced, so I pulled her into a nuc and made another nuc with a single cell and left the parent hive with nice cells to sort out. The original queen ended up just disappearing a few weeks later and emergency cells were made. The original hive ended up LW as well, not sure what happened there, I left the two cells and came back a month later expecting a laying queen, ended up with LW. So this is where I started collecting my germplasm of queens as well. I got a couple ripe queencells from Ray Marler, his queens at the time had some possible Strachan genetics and to fix the LW I picked up a couple queens from Honey-4-All. The virgin from the original queen ended up disapearing so gave that nuc a ripe cell from Ray and the LW hive got frames of brood for two weeks and when I placed the 3rd frame of brood in, I introduced a queen from Honey-4-All. I also made a nuc for a second queen I received from him. I also placed an order for 3 WSU queens at the time, I requested one of each of their Italian, Carni, and Caucasian line. At this point I was pretty happy, had some bees, was making splits, diversifying my lines and I then was able to collect a few swarms in early summer. A small three framer showed up at work, I was able to collect it easily, and then a co-worker heard what happened and she had a swarm in her front yard, and at some point a few weeks later I had a swarm that moved into the old equipment from the second hive I had bought at the house. The swarm from work was a nice striped queen,  a mix of carni and Italian genetics most likely, the co-worker had a nice cordovan queen, lighter bees, here's a pic of her


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## JRG13

Never got a look at the queen that moved in, kind of testy bees, runny drippy, got a little defensive the longer the hive was open, pretty much just kind of ignored them. Here's the Italian WSU queen


Here's the queen that got mated from the cell I received from Ray 

Here's my first queen that I got from the supercedure cell


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## squarepeg

very nice photos jrg! my queens tend be colored up somewhere between the wsu queen and the one from the supercedure cell in the last photo. i've never seen a completely yellow one like that before.


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## johno

Following your story, please excuse the ignorance but what is a wsu queen.
Johno


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## JRG13

Hi Johno,

WSU is from Washington state University breeding program. I believe Sue Cobey is involved, they brought in some old world genetics via drone semen from Europe as part of the program, so I was just testing out the waters. The only thing with their program is their season is kind of late, so queens are available a little late in the year which means you can't really do much with them except get them ready for fall and winter.


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## mbevanz

Washington State University is Steve Sheppard. I think Sue Cobey is on the coast in Washington. WSU is in Pullman, WA.


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## johno

The WSU queen, is this a continuation of NW Carniolan? JRG13 can you tell us a little about the qualities of these queens.
Thanks Johno


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## RayMarler

For anyone interested, more can be found on the WSU queen breeding program here:

http://entomology.wsu.edu/apis/breeding-program/queens/


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## JRG13

She's listed under the personnel for the WSU program, but yets, Steve Sheppard heads up the program.


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## JRG13

Well, the saga continues... Sorry, I feel like I'm rambling on but I feel the need to describe how I got all the bees I have so everyone can get an idea how things progressed. Johno, I will get to how the WSU queens performed shortly, but if you want a quick idea... Were the queens mite resistant/tolerant - not so much, was there potential there - I believe so, Would I try them again- I'm planning on getting some more this year. 

As 2013 progressed, I really felt I missed out on that VSH breeder and I really liked the description of the Pol-Line bees Glenn had, and the only thing they had left when they were about to retire were the Carniolans so I still wanted to scratch that itch so to say. Luckily AdamF at VPqueens was ready to fill that void of reasonably priced II VSH breeder queens and he had taken up the Pol-Line strain. As it was kind of later in the season I opted to get one delivered at the tail end, not really planning to produce any daughters for 2013 but overwinter and be ready to go out the gate in 2014. I believe I got her in the first week of August, introduced her via push in cage (what a nerve wracking experience) and everything seemed fine until about the third week in September where I found the queen gone and 3-4 poor emergency cells present. What a gut wrenching day that was, I still remember it and it started the 'curse' of the Pol Line for me, and we'll come back to that in a bit. I did get a virgin queen emerge but it was late to get a queen mated and the nuc ending up absconding with the virgin. I guess that's just a risk you take with II queens though, or any queen for that matter. Everything was looking pretty good up to that point too, except I did notice she only laid the back half of the frames, the half away from the entrance and it wasn't really that cold and they were fairly protected from wind etc.. so I always found that odd but she did lay a nice solid pattern and a good population of bees were in the nuc and I figure with the poor emergency cells, she must've failed and stopped laying and by the time the bees sensed it only older larva were available but that's just conjecture.


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## squarepeg

please feel free to ramble at will jrg, this is good stuff!


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## JRG13

So, beginning of summer 2013, hives are looking good. My strategy for housing new queens and splits was pretty much to use 5 frame nuc boxes, let them build up and overwinter as a single 5 frame or 5 over 5 if they got strong enough. My mite strategy was still in development though and my main approach was I still wanted to evaluate all the new bees I had so I pretty much kept them untreated up to this point. At this point though, I'm noticing the mites are building up nicely and are getting very noticeable, especially in the older splits and established hives.

Here's a hive Summary:

Elk Grove: 
F1 Kona Daughter hive, superceded - failed to requeen - now a Honey-4-All queen
Kona Queen #2: Built up nicely, but mite population noticeable
F2 Daughter queen split from supercedure: 5X5 nuc, building up nicely

Weimar:
Queen from TF Russian breeder: 3 deep hive, full of bees and honey, mite population healthy

Woodland Location #1: 
Relocated testy swarm from house to here
Italian WSU Queen: Looking good, strong nuc
Carniolan WSU Queen: Looking good

Woodland Location #2 (main yard):
Kona Queen from bought hive #1: Very prolific queen, 2 deeps and 3 medium hive. mites building up
Nuc with Ray Marler queen: Nuc that virgin queen failed after losing the original F1 Kona daughter that got superceded
Nuc with F2 Kona Queen: Nuc made with second batch of supercedure cell from Kona F1
Swarm from work: I called her the Monsanto queen, 5X5 configuration, looked good, mite levels seem ok
Cordovan Swarm: Swarm from co-worker with Cordovan queen. 1 deep and 1 medium, drew all frames, looking good, mite levels seem ok
Split from Russian queen from Weimar: Nice little prolific black queen, walk away split, 5 frame nuc full of bees, mite levels very noticeable
Caucasian WSU queen: Looking ok, slow build up compared to Italian and Carni WSU queens, feeding sporadically, ant issues as well

Home:
Second queen from Honey-4-All: Strong 5X5 nuc

So not too bad, took 4 hives, turned them into 12 and captured 3 swarms and the year wasn't over yet.


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## tpope

I have no problem with the way this is unfolding. I will be closely following due to my intense interest in the subject. In fact, I should follow your example...


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## Arnie

Great thread.


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## JRG13

We'll start this one off with a pic, here's the Kona queen that I had in Woodland 

She was a third year queen, so it wasn't surprising in June or July I found her being superceded. I took the opportunity to remove her and to nuc her, and I pulled 4 splits from the hive and leaving it as a single with cells to requeen. Ants got the better of two of the splits. The main hive requeened successfully and two splits also yielded laying queens, one of which had acceptance issues after mating, and ended up getting her wings chewed off but was accepted after I caged her for a day.

This pretty much sums of the hive situation for 2013, so now we're at about 18 hives entering fall. 2013 proved to be a difficult fall as well. The main yard was having ant issues and some robbing. Ended up shutting it down and moving everything to the other location anyways as the landowners decided to sell it. I moved the hive from my house containing the second queen from Honey-4-All as well as I set up the Pol Line breeder at home. The fall dearth took it's toll though, the year before must've been an exceptional year for forage, but as I never had bees before that I didn't know it. Also, the mite PMS really started to set in come September, and I even caught another swarm on September 1st. A small swarm a little bigger than a grapefruit probably, but it had a nice laying queen and it took to sub and syrup readily and grew fairly steadily in the fall and even winter. As a desperate attempt to salvage some hives, I tried a little OAV but since most of my hives I set up on the 3/8" bottom board it didn't quite work out well so I probably only tried it on 2 nucs, one was the old Kona queen now in a nuc and they weren't too happy about me sticking the gadget in there.

The first casualties started rolling in though. The first was the daughter queen from Weimar. I was a little hurt over this one as she was my only black queen at the time and was by all standards a decent queen. I made the split in early May and you can now do the math, it took it all of 5 months to mite out, probably due to the fact that the parent hive had a growing population of mites at the time of the split. Second casualty was the queen I moved from the house to Woodland, mites had hit them pretty hard as well as the transition from a good forage area to a poor one. The third casualty was the Caucasian WSU queen who had just kept on struggling and finally gave into the lack of stores and mite pressure they were under. The 4th casualty was the other remaining Kona queen I had in Elk Grove. The 5th casualty of the year was the hive in Weimar, they had shrunk down due to mites and decided to supercede the queen in October, they were not successful. The 6th casualty of the year was the Kona queen which I had split 5 ways essentially. Turns out her nuc was aggressive when I oav'd them because they were in fact queenless at the time. The 7th hive to fall to mites that year was the original hive that Kona queen headed which had successfully requeened and looked decent but come winter they were gone as well due to PMS. Basically 19 hives going into fall, 12 remained but the lack of treatment at the proper time had still taken it's toll. The cordovan queen that was a deep and medium full of bees previous was down to about 4 frames of bees. Same with the Monsanto queen which had gone from a strong 5 over 5 to about 3 frames of bees. The new splits hadn't faired much better, the WSU queens and daughters from the Kona queen were down to a frame of bees, but all had put up 3-4 frames of capped honey at least. Ray's queen was down to a seam of bees as well, but with 4 frames of capped honey at least. The mean swarm from the house was going strong as ever though. Although a bit testy, those bees were always flying and active. They maintained about 12-14 frames at the time in 3 deeps, the top being mostly capped honey and drone comb. The queens in Elk Grove faired better as the forage was great over there. The F2 daughter from my first supercedure/split was a strong 5 over 5 and Honey-4-All's queen was about 7-8 frames of bees but with a deep and medium full of capped honey. All in all, suffered about 40% losses, all due to mites and most of the hives looking like garbage, but luckily we have very mild winters here. Spring 2014, here we come!


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## JRG13

Spring 2014 rolls around.... Whatever was left made it so I had 12 colonies to work with. A few definitely needed some help though. The queen from Ray Marler was down to a handful of bees and the queen. I gave them some pollen sub which stimulated some laying but I eventually had to give them a frame of brood and bees. One of the daughters from the Kona queen that had her wings torn up pretty good also needed a frame of bees and brood, her sister was on the cusp but I felt like they would be alright on their own, but they weren't much better. I was still pretty discouraged about my 2013 losses though and the shape of the hives going into fall so I was really starting to strategize on what to do about mites. I'd gotten the OAV unit, a Heilyser JB 200 but didn't really care much for the method of application and results weren't really promising on the few hives it got tested on but the method was still in it's infancy at the time. I still figured VSH was a good option, and still wanting the Pol Line stock I ordered a few more breeders from VP queens. I ordered a Pol Line, Adam's Italian X Pure VSH, and his VSH Carni line. I also wanted to hedge my bets so I ordered from Broke-T who had open mated Carni daughters from VP queens and had a pretty good reputation on Beesource. I ordered 3 queens there. I also wanted to bring in some of Joe Latshaw stocks, and Pine Ridge Farms was offering open mated Aurea daughters that were mated with carni drones predominantly so I ordered 2 queens from there. I also ordered a breeder from Lauri Miller since she had incorporated some of Glenn's stocks in her bees and was having good success with minimal treatments with them. I also contacted Zia queens but they were fairly busy that year so it didn't work out, but I still had bees to make some splits from as well to evaluate, especially in some of the swarms I collected and I really liked in what I saw with Phil's queen as far as production traits go.

From a management stand point, I also wanted to adjust my strategy. Small cell got a lot of talk at the time so I figured I'd give it a try. Not that I really bought into it as an effective measure or anything but I figured if it could have an impact it was worth trying. I opted to go with small cell wax foundation from Mann Lake in this regard as it seems none of my bees take to plastic very well, especially the areas that don't get much of a nectar flow. In this regard I try not to say much about it except that it doesn't really seem to do much for mite management for me but you really need to see how the bees drew the foundation out etc... and not every single frame in the hive is small cell as stuff gets shifted around and I have some foundationless frames and a mix of frames from the 6 hives I bought which probably consisted of 140 frames of various configurations, either pierco full plastic or wood frames and plastic foundation or just standard wax foundation.

Fortunately, the consolidated yard in Woodland had a lot of almonds around it, so early forage was excellent. There was also a fair amount of wild mustard and radish. The first order of business was to move the September swarm as I had just placed the bees underneath where they swarmed at, kind of in the front yard of the property. Only issue was, I knew some of the foragers would return so it also proved to be a good time to make the first split of the season. I relocated the hive to it's permanent spot in the yard and it had grown to about 8 frames of bees and had a pretty good foraging force. I took a nuc and pulled a single frame of bees and brood from the Cordovan swarm queen and set it in the old spot to catch all the returning foragers. Checked it a few days later and it was probably 3 frames of bees total and they had started some queencells so I closed it up and left it at that. Around the same time I also did a walk away split from Honey-4-All's queen in Elk grove as they were doing quite well. I moved this split to my house to get mated. The other hive there also got a 3rd five framer box put on top of it as I didn't feel like putting it in 10 frame equipment just yet.

About three weeks from making the first split of the year I checked for emergence and found a nice cordovan virgin. I thought she was a bit runty at first but I figured it was better than nothing and just an experiment in catching foragers to boost a single frame split. Here's a pic before mating:



After mating:



Was a pretty nice looking queen and proved to be a good layer. Once she was laying I moved the hive to Davis. At this point in time I also started to grade and evaluate the queens that I had and giving them nicknames where appropriate. The mean swarm from my house in West Sac became 'Swarm Mama'. I thought they may have some resistance/tolerance to varroa as they exhibited some Russian characteristics but I still kind of gave them a wide birth as they were a little testy, runny, drippy bees. Will not accept a queen or queencell from other hives either. I recall inspecting them early spring and I had forgotten I gave them a few foundationless frames the year before and they had pretty much drew them all drone comb and come mid spring raised 3-4 cycles of drones in every one of them which should of tipped me off at their intent at the time but they weren't overly crowded in 3 deeps but Swarm Mama earned her name because quite frankly, every spring I had her, she hit the trees or attempted too. They also lit up my land owner when mowing right before swarming and when we shook them out of the tree, they weren't very happy then either so they had to go. Unfortunately at the time, Ray Marler had a rough year so I figured it was a good time to donate him some quirky bees. I ended up keeping the swarm with the original queen as the landowners just wanted the mean hive to go away and didn't really understand that was now the mean hive, but the original hive requeened and as soon as she was laying I donated them to Ray. Since Swarm Mama was nuc'd now, and I inspected them more frequently, they actually calmed down a bit for the year too. The other quirky thing they did after swarming was to kill a massive amount of drones they had reared previously. They were pretty mite infested at the time as well, so any thoughts of resistance or tolerance went out the door as well and I dropped some Apivar in both hives to help clean them up.


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## squarepeg

that's an amazing before and after mating comparison. i pinched a queen once for looking runty like that, perhaps i should have waited...


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## JRG13

I can't say for certain square, but I think some virgins shrink a lot just before mating and there's no real standard to judge them by, except maybe look more at their width then total length and the size of their thorax. I'll know better in spring when queens will plump up more, but I did produce a daughter off my VP Carni, and I must've caught her right when she emerged as I was very pleased with her size as a virgin. I checked her a few days later and she'd shrunk up a lot and even after mating I would say my impression is, she was bigger the first time I saw her as a virgin.


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## Nordak

"They were pretty mite infested at the time as well, so any thoughts of resistance or tolerance went out the door as well..."

Hey JRG, great read, keep it coming. Did your "Swarm Mama" colony exhibit any outward signs of mites that led to your decision to treat, or was it count based? Thanks.


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## RayMarler

JRG13 said:


> Spring 2014 rolls around.... At this point in time I also started to grade and evaluate the queens that I had and giving them nicknames where appropriate. The mean swarm from my house in West Sac became 'Swarm Mama'. I thought they may have some resistance/tolerance to varroa as they exhibited some Russian characteristics but I still kind of gave them a wide birth as they were a little testy, runny, drippy bees. Will not accept a queen or queencell from other hives either. I recall inspecting them early spring and I had forgotten I gave them a few foundationless frames the year before and they had pretty much drew them all drone comb and come mid spring raised 3-4 cycles of drones in every one of them which should of tipped me off at their intent at the time but they weren't overly crowded in 3 deeps but Swarm Mama earned her name because quite frankly, every spring I had her, she hit the trees or attempted too. They also lit up my land owner when mowing right before swarming and when we shook them out of the tree, they weren't very happy then either so they had to go. Unfortunately at the time, Ray Marler had a rough year so I figured it was a good time to donate him some quirky bees. I ended up keeping the swarm with the original queen as the landowners just wanted the mean hive to go away and didn't really understand that was now the mean hive, but the original hive requeened and as soon as she was laying I donated them to Ray. Since Swarm Mama was nuc'd now, and I inspected them more frequently, they actually calmed down a bit for the year too. The other quirky thing they did after swarming was to kill a massive amount of drones they had reared previously. They were pretty mite infested at the time as well, so any thoughts of resistance or tolerance went out the door as well and I dropped some Apivar in both hives to help clean them up.


Some of the best bees I ever had as they made me a better bee keeper!
Everything Jeff said is true, these bees are really something. They have several genetic strains in them though. Some offspring are more Italian, some are more Russian, and some are... who knows what. A lot of propolis and many are runny and drippy and won't take cells or queens to requeen or when making splits, and I would not call them mean, but I got to using a smoker and wearing a veil every time now. I started trying to clean up some of the genetics of offspring this past year (2016) and am happy with a couple that I have this winter so far. I have high hopes for that line of bees, they seem to be more varroa tolerant than most bees I've kept here, and the genetics I've kept so far are a little calmer on the combs and easier to work with. OK, sorry for the interrupt, carry on with the story, it's been very good reading.


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## Harley Craig

great thread! Keep the posts coming!


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## Fusion_power

> i pinched a queen once for looking runty like that, perhaps i should have waited...


 If a queen shows worker characteristics, she should be pinched. The simplest worker trait to look for is pollen baskets. Queens don't have them, workers do. Beyond that, I'm in favor of medium to large size queens. In the past, I got rid of a lot of rat tailed queens. They never produce enough eggs to maintain a colony.


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## JRG13

Nordak,

They get a little DWV but I would say in general, tolerate mites better than really susceptible hives. It was more based on the amount of phoretics I saw at the time, but it was a mild winter that year and drone production probably started in January and the 3 foundationless frames they had didn't help things out since she laid it wall to wall drones. The carnage the few days after they swarmed was immense too, just a huge pile of drones outside, I don't think I've ever seen a colony do that either, but then again, I only ever had one colony swarm last year, which happened to be that first queen from that initial supercedure of that Kona F1 from 2013.


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## Nordak

JRG13 said:


> Nordak,
> 
> They get a little DWV but I would say in general, tolerate mites better than really susceptible hives. It was more based on the amount of phoretics I saw at the time, but it was a mild winter that year and drone production probably started in January and the 3 foundationless frames they had didn't help things out since she laid it wall to wall drones. The carnage the few days after they swarmed was immense too, just a huge pile of drones outside, I don't think I've ever seen a colony do that either, but then again, I only ever had one colony swarm last year, which happened to be that first queen from that initial supercedure of that Kona F1 from 2013.


I've have colonies evict drones pretty early, but nothing on the level you described. Generally slightly precedes dearth. That's interesting.


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## JRG13

I wanted to post more last night, but with these rapidly changing storm fronts it's triggered my migraines to come on. I thought I had avoided them for the year....


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## RayMarler

Nordak and JRG13
I would say that evicting all the drones might have been from time of year, it starts first of summer here as the dearth starts and the queen starts slowing down, drastically in some hives, especially swarm mama daughters. Also, that could be a reason of eviction, the bees performing mite control. Evict the drones and shut down brooding after the main spring flows. I find that at that time the mites then hit the worker brood pretty hard. My thinking at the moment is that all the drone brood helps keep the varroa out of the worker brood throughout the spring. But then the summer solstice happens, dearth starts, queen shuts down or drastically slows down, drones get evicted and drone comb gets backfilled, so worker brood is where all the increase, percentage wise to brood, all the mites go. This becomes a critical time in my area to check for mites and treat if needed. Usually it's needed badly by the end of June or first of July. I may try doing some shook swarm splits at that time and see if it helps with mite control any at all.


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## Nordak

RayMarler said:


> Nordak and JRG13
> I would say that evicting all the drones might have been from time of year, it starts first of summer here as the dearth starts and the queen starts slowing down, drastically in some hives, especially swarm mama daughters. Also, that could be a reason of eviction, the bees performing mite control. Evict the drones and shut down brooding after the main spring flows. I find that at that time the mites then hit the worker brood pretty hard. My thinking at the moment is that all the drone brood helps keep the varroa out of the worker brood throughout the spring. But then the summer solstice happens, dearth starts, queen shuts down or drastically slows down, drones get evicted and drone comb gets backfilled, so worker brood is where all the increase, percentage wise to brood, all the mites go. This becomes a critical time in my area to check for mites and treat if needed. Usually it's needed badly by the end of June or first of July. I may try doing some shook swarm splits at that time and see if it helps with mite control any at all.


Thanks Ray. My observations line up with yours extremely well. I too I think having drones in Spring is a big benefit to controlling mite build up. Thanks for sharing this. Gave me some further insight as to some guesswork on my part.


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## RayMarler

Nordak said:


> Thanks Ray. My observations line up with yours extremely well. I too I think having drones in Spring is a big benefit to controlling mite build up. Thanks for sharing this. Gave me some further insight as to some guesswork on my part.


Yes, All I have on this is guess work from observations as well. Hopefully it will lead us both and everyone to further insights and more successful beekeeping management.

Yes, it may be good in the spring, but when the hive starts backfilling the drone cells and drones die off or leave or get booted, it sure does cause a large heavy hit on the worker brood. Treatments or splits or splits with treatments in timing with this can be very beneficial to controlling mite numbers in summer, I'm betting. In my area I'm noticing this starting around middle of June, perhaps due to solstice and lack of enough good forage.


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## Nordak

RayMarler said:


> Yes, All I have on this is guess work from observations as well. Hopefully it will lead us both and everyone to further insights and more successful beekeeping management.
> 
> Yes, it may be good in the spring, but when the hive starts backfilling the drone cells and drones die off or leave or get booted, it sure does cause a large heavy hit on the worker brood. Treatments or splits or splits with treatments in timing with this can be very beneficial to controlling mite numbers in summer, I'm betting. In my area I'm noticing this starting around middle of June, perhaps due to solstice and lack of enough good forage.


I've noticed generally that the drone eviction often coincides with the queen slowing down. Like you stated, all timing due to dearth. In my climate, there is very little forage during Summer, so the phoretic mites have a tough time reproducing as this coincides with the queen slowing down on brood rearing. I think it gives a chance for bees showing resistance to take care of many of the adult mites looking for meals within the adult bee population as reproduction has slowed considerably. This is one reason I try not to feed during times of dearth, as I think this pattern is essential to helping my bees cope with mites. If I feed in Summer, I start stimulating brood rearing and it kicks mite reproduction in high gear again, so I try to avoid it. In the past when I've noticed problems, it seems to coincide with the flow returning in Fall. This year I saw virtually no mite related problems with the exception of one hive that was showing signs of PMS come September. I was going to requeen, but decided I'd let them ride it out and see how it went. To my surprise, they are still going. Will be interesting to see what happens with this colony this year. Anyway, don't want to take up too much of JRG's space with my ramblings here. Again, this is all observation and conjecture on my part. Nothing proven other than the bees are still alive. Thanks for the discussion, Ray.


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## ethanhogan

Thank you guys. Hope the migrains go away so I can continue reading soon hahah


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## JRG13

Yeah, I'm hoping they taper off now. Last night was rough, woke up about 1.5 hours after falling asleep due to the pain, pills did nothing, tossed and turned, moved to the couch to recline, tossed my cookies as the pain was nauseating me, finally fell back asleep about 6am, kids woke me up at 6:45....


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## JRG13

Ok, back to 2014, first splits on the ground, bees building up nicely, started evaluating queens. I tend to overwinter in nucs when I can as well, especially with our mild winters, which aren't severely mild, we just don't get a lot of snow, but we can get periods of relatively cold days and nights and extended periods of rain December - March so you still need to have your hives winter ready, but it also means a frame of bees can successfully overwinter if you keep them dry and they have enough stores. The WSU queens overwintered well, they didn't need any help come spring and overwintered with a nice viable cluster of bees in their nucs and had put up enough stores in fall to not have to baby them. Both queens had good brood patterns and stores and the bees were gentle, the Italian line was a little farther along then the Carniolan. The Kona daughter queens all looked quite well, only had 3 left at this point. The F2 from the original supercedure and two F1's from the hive in Woodland that was a pretty good mother colony. One queen had chewed wings prior to mating, didn't need a nick name for her obviously and had no worries of her swarming off any time soon. I had to boost this one with a frame of brood though, but they built up nicely. The other colony I nicknamed 'Super Queen'. Didn't overwinter much better than her sister, but I did not boost them with a frame of brood and bees. This queen was the first to fill out her nuc in 2014, even faster than the WSU queens which had 2-3 frames of bees when spring started. Queen from Ray Marler's stock needed a frame of brood and bees as well after initial pollen sub as her cluster size wasn't viable. Queen was heavy on the Carni side and it showed during fall when they capped 4 frames of honey in the nuc and pretty much wound down from there but mite pressure took it's toll in winter but they put up the most honey for the size of colony at the time. Colony took well to the frame of brood and built up nicely as spring advanced though. 

Hives in Elk Grove were doing well. I had the F2 Kona daughter there and Honey-4-All's queen, both of which were packing in stores. I ended up having to go 5x5x5 for the kona queen and eventually put them in a double deep and a medium. Had them set up on a Country Rubes bottom board, and the mite drop was pretty high it seemed but they didn't seem to suffer much from it. It seemed to taper off eventually though and I doused them once with Oxalic in spring, both hives at that location. I also made a split from the queen sourced from Honey-4-All and put it next to the parent colony.

The original split I had at the house in West Sac ended up looking very nice. Honey-4-All or Noble Apiaries has some nice queens, productive and easy to work. I ended moving it as a 5X5 to Weimar to replace the bees there and I ended up semi-checker boarding it into a double deep with some drawn comb in the bottom box as it was a pretty strong hive at the time with a lot of capped brood ready to emerge and a very nice looking queen.

Started getting queens from orders in May, pretty sure I got 4 queens from Broke-T on May 3rd, just before Cinco de Mayo. Got them all nuc'd up the next day, one nuc was queenless already and after a couple days I made the brilliant decision to just release the queen as the bees seemed amenable to accepting her... Here's a pro tip for everyone... just let the bees release the queen, no need to rush an introduction.... anyways, what was I saying, after introducing the 3 queens I got from Broke-T the queens were out laying and looked good in general, even had green dots for free. The 'other' nuc got a frame from superqueen so they could make their own queen and they successfully performed that feat. 

Next I got two Cordovan queens from Pine Ridge Farms, introduced them successfully, they looked very good as well. I believe they were Latshaw Aurea daughters mated in his carniolan yard. I then received a breeder from Lauri Miller which was introduced successfully. She also sent me 4-5 virgins no cost, but the post office, even though it was clearly instructed to hold for pick up, decided to deliver them on a 103 degree day, and we have those communal boxes that sit on the side of the street. Well, I got home early to check the mail as I hadn't heard anything, but got to cooking dinner instead and about 90 minutes had passed before I remembered. The breeder turned out to be ok as well as one virgin. I think two were DOA and 1-2 were still alive but all the attendants were dead and the queens weren't looking too good but were moving around. The virgins were some of the biggest queens I've seen though and I must give Kudos to Lauri, she raises some quality queens but you don't need me to tell you that. I tried to intro the healthy virgin but it didn't work out, well maybe it did, the whole nuc absconded, I presume with the virgin but I can't say for certain. 

The last queens I received for the year were three breeders from VP Queens. I had planned on just overwintering them for the year and got them at the tail end of the season. I ordered a Pol-Line, Italian X Pure VsH, and his Carniolan. It was still pretty hot for being so late in the year and the nuc's got stressed. Luckily two of the queens made it though, but of course the Pol-Line was dead in the cage the very next day, so now I was 0-2 on Pol-Lines, but although it was another gut wrencher to find that queen dead, I was glad at least the other 2 made it. I think some of it was a combination of making late splits and leaving them in the yard and I used some of the WSU bees for the splits and they seemed to beard more than the rest of the bees I had on the real hot days, so basically a bulk of the bees were bearding on the nuc's and not very many bees were actually inside caring for the brood and queens. Lesson was learned though, I typically move all splits from the parent yards now and if it's more into summer time, I use a shaded location to transfer them too and it seems to alleviate a lot of the stress on making splits in hot weather.

I also made a few more splits due to supercedures and colony reduction on swarm mama. Ray Marler's queen ended up getting superceded mid summer. She was in a packed 5x5 and I found a queen cell on the bottom of the frame, but I was kind of in denial mode, so I tore it down. Checked a week later, found two cells, so I did a three way split. I artificially swarmed the queen with a frame of brood and a shake from a frame of bees into a nuc, and added 4 pf100's. I then split the two nuc boxes, each with a cell and brood and put them on their own bottom boards and left the queen in the original location to pick up the foragers. All the splits were successful, except the queen got superceded a few weeks alter with a large cell, that turned out to be a dud. I eventually got them queenright with a frame of eggs/larvae from the WSU Italian queen.


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## ethanhogan

Didn't you have some lauri Miller queens in the mix?


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## JRG13

Yeah, sorry, I submitted the post to take a break, I'm currently editing it to add on


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## JRG13

Ok, back to it....

Swarm Mama started to build up well again and to keep her colony size down I performed two walk away splits. Both drew queen cells and hatched virgins. One ended up being a really small queen, so I pinched her and introduced a queencell in a roller cage. I plugged the top of the cage with wax but these bees really don't like foreign queens so they chewed threw it and destroyed the cell. I gave them some brood and bees from one of the WSU queens and they started to draw out cells but tore them down a few days after capping... Around the same time I found the September 1st swarm I collected in 2013 superceding with a few nice cells, as a last ditch effort I cut one of the cells out and placed it into the nuc and they finally accepted a new queen. A nice virgin emerged but she was damaged at the end of abdomen on her mating flight, had a big dent in it but she started to lay and was able to get the nuc through winter even though it was late in the year and she didn't have much to work with, she became known as 'damaged mama'. 

I believe that was about all queens and splits done for the year. I was still formulating my mite plan though and still wanting to screen for resistance so treatments were again on hold but as it was getting towards fall it was getting obvious something would need to be done. So lets tally it up by location and I'll add some details I left out, but for all instances we're at about August 2014...

Weimar - Noble Apiaries F1 Queen from West sac... after placing the hive I came back about 4 weeks later and to much disappointment hadn't done much. Found them queenless with some capped brood still emerging and laying worker started. I brought in a split, donated 1 frame of eggs and larva to this hive and also placed the split there... both hives drew queencells and had virgins emerge. The split was successful, the main hive, the virgin never got mated, was still running around as a virgin in October, still had a little bit LW, left hive to dwindle. The nuc hadn't done much either, it did not survive winter as well.

Elk Grove - Noble Apiaries Queen - 2 deeps, 3 mediums, mites apparent, slight DWV
F2 Kona Queen - 2 deeps, 2 mediums, high mite drop, brood becoming spotty, slight DWV
Noble F1 split, 2 deeps, mites noticeable, slight DWV

Davis - F1 Cordovan Queen, first queen of 2014, 2 deeps and a medium, mild PMS setting in

West Sacramento - Lauri Miller Breeder Queen, looked good, some mites, no symptoms of PMS

Woodland (auxillary yard) - Carni Breeder, looked good, got Apivar but mite levels not noticeable
Woodland (main yard)- WSU Italian: 5x5, took multiple splits, looking good - mites building up, slight PMS symptoms
WSU Carniolan: 5X5, took multiple splits, looking good, mites noticeable
Broke-T queens: All 3 looked similar, transferred all to single 10 frame equipment with internal feeders, 6-7 frames of bees, 3-4 frames brood, looked decent, some phoretic mites, no PMS
Cordovan Swarm Queen: 2 Deeps, 2 mediums - 2 splits taken, PMS starting to be apparent, mites noticeable
Kona F2-F3: Sister to Elk Grove Kona F2, superceded in summer, 2 deeps
September Swarm 2013 queen: Superceded, 2 deeps, Apivar in, new queen looks good
Monsanto Swarm Queen: 2 Deeps, 2 splits taken, mites noticeable, PMS apparent
Swarm Mama: 2 deeps, Apivar early as mites were becoming apparent
VP Italian X Pure VSH: 5X5 with 4 frames of bees in the top box, Apivar, no mite issues but was recent split
Super queen F1 - single deep, looked good, Apivar
Super Queen - 2 deeps, PMS apparent, colony was collapsing, Apivar
No wing Kona F1 - single deep, slight-moderate PMS present, 1 split taken
Ray Marler F1 - Italian looking, 5X5 look good
Ray Marler F1 - Carni looking, single deep, look good
WSU Italian F1 - Nuc, look good, 3-4 frames of bees, looks good, large queen
Swarm Mama F1 - New queen superceded, nuc dwindled in fall as it was no longer viable
Damaged Mama - Sister to September F1 queen, they look identical except the dent, reddish/rootbeer colored Italian, no stripes, 2 frames of bees, Apivar in as insurance
Pine Ridge Queens - 1 queen remained, looked decent, 4-5 frames of bees in the nuc, the other queen had absconded in late summer

That puts us as 26 colonies from 12 hives from spring, a lot of which were nucs, I excluded the hives in Weimar from that count, so it would actually be 28 colonies was the high from 12. When I noted splits taken, that just means they donated 2-3 frames for a split at some point during the season, I did not list them all but where I remember taking splits from them, I made the note so you can get a sense of why some started as nucs but are still 5X5. That about sums up early fall, next we'll get to September when the losses really start rolling in from the mites....


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## JRG13

Varroa ended up being bad as usual in the late fall of 2014. The Monsanto swarm queen ended up succumbing first. I basically found them getting robbed out, and they were down to a few hundred bees and the queen. I re-hived them into a 5 frame nuc and reduced the entrance down to stop the robbing. They ended up surviving and I had to donate a frame of brood and bees to them before winter set in. Next in line was the Cordovan swam queen. I gave them 3 rounds of oxalic, but the PMS was severe by late September and they ended up collapsing down to about a frame of bees from two deeps and a medium that were fully occupied. Even after the 3 treatments, mites were still readily visible and the PMS was reduced but still noticeable so they got a strip of Apivar to do a final knockdown. Fortunately, they made it as well as 2014 was a very mild winter and January 2015 was I believe a record setting warm although December was typical and we got a few weeks of frost around Christmas time. The hive in Davis was the next victim, I just didn't have time to get a mite treatment in early fall, but I knew PMS was setting in when I checked them last, but they succumbed rather quickly. Although I liked the Cordovan line as they were decent bees, they were obviously very susceptible to mites in both mother and daughter. Super Queen was the next victim as well as her sister, wingless. The Kona lines proved to be decent bees as well, but also seriously lacking in any type of tolerance let alone resistance. All the Broke-T queens remained untreated but shrank down to about 3 frames of bees each, but had good stores. The last queen in Woodland to fail was the WSU Italian, the colony was alive come spring which pretty much started in January, but they were queenless and down to just a small cluster. The Carniolan lined proved a little better but had reduced down to about 2 frames of bees and received apivar as well.

Elk Grove faired a little better, but the colonies still took a big hit and got a late round of Apivar to get them through. When I checked them mid December, Original Noble Apiaries queen was down to about 4 frames of bees, the split was slightly better around 5 frames and the original F2 Kona queen was about 6 frames as well. Apivar seemed to do the trick though and all the hives rebounded and took advantage of the warm January. So, now that look back, 2014 wasn't too bad loss wise, but we hit a high of about 28 hives, down to 22 after mite kill with 3 very weak hives that would only be rebuilding all of 2015 and the rest of the hives collapsing down to 3-5 frames of bees with late season Apivar getting them into 2015.....


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## JRG13

Reflections on 2014...

Although it wasn't a bad year, it was still discouraging at the end to see the bees collapsing down. It was fairly obvious what the problem was, but I still had that notion to screen for resistance, heck, I was starting to settle for maybe a little tolerance and you could see that in some of the bees but it was still hard to compare due to location. The bees in Elk Grove get a nice flow most of the year, build up and put up 3-4 supers of honey, where as Woodland, you might get a medium super off a double deep in summer if you're lucky, other than that, some of the nuc's could surprise you or even a 5X5 could cape 6-7 frames depending on the bees, especially the lines that seemed more frugal like the WSU Carni or the darker queens from Ray Marler, but they also tend to naturally shrink the fall cluster as well. 

Another thing that opened my eyes a little is spending about half a day listening to Keith Jarret. He invited me to come up and grab some sub in the fall, even bought me lunch, he talked I listened for the most part. I have to give Kudos to Keith, he has his game plan down and he sticks to it. He realizes the value of strong colonies and the ROI each one is capable of and manages his bees as such. He showed me his stack of duds... about 5-6 singles stacked on top of each other, with a special innercover that acted as top of one hive and bottom for the one above it, the entrances alternating each one to face different directions then the one above or below it. Pretty good way to take advantage of the hives insulating each other. Of course he cracked a few, and they had rebounded quite well from when they were culled out months prior and were all just packed with bees. I'd like to spend a little more time talking to Keith this year if he gets some time too, but he helped consolidate my plan and strategy on what else to look for in colonies besides the basic and mite resistance.

Another thing I really started contemplating on was when to actually start screening for mites. As for now, my populations were small, but diverse but it really doesn't make much sense to screen such a small population. It's really more useful to keep your bees healthy until you have the resources to really make some splits and grafts from each queen line to be evaluated in some quantity. That being said, 2015 turned out alright until the tail end of the year when I had to move everything but I will cover that in a bit.


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## Riverderwent

Enjoying this thread. Reads like a Clancy novel.


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## JRG13

I can add some guns and intrigue if you want!


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## squarepeg

Riverderwent said:


> Enjoying this thread. Reads like a Clancy novel.


i had the same exact thought david. the suspense is killing me, but no way to cheat by skipping to the last chapter. 

good job jrg!


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## Riverderwent

JRG13 said:


> I can add some guns and intrigue if you want!


It already has mite bombs, drippy bees, and rat tailed queens.


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## 1102009

Great posting JRG13.
Thanks for writing in this way so it´s possible for me to understand what you do.
Very entertaining too.


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## JRG13

Riverderwent said:


> It already has mite bombs, drippy bees, and rat tailed queens.


And chemical warfare


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## RBRamsey

I am going grab a seat before it completely fills up ... Great posts... It sounds familiar to what I am going through this winter on some of my colonies.


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## JRG13

Really hating this weather now.... the migraines are back, but I'll try to get back to it ASAP. Bees are flying today which is nice though....


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## Gazelle

Zomig !!!!


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## JRG13

I'll look into it, it's about 90% under control, just took awhile today.


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## JRG13

I'm feeling a little antsy about 2017.... Hopefully the girls have stayed high and dry, but it's been very wet and very windy. I think everyone had top weights so nothing should've blown off though. 

So, 2015 was a good year, but a year of change. Kid #3 was born on March 22nd. Work had been busy, but there were rumors the wheat program was on the chopping block but until we actually heard anything official it was business as usual. Wife decided she wanted to move closer to her work and the daughters school. It was also the worst year of the so called drought over here. January was the warmest and driest I believe in history. It had basically become spring about one week in, but the bees weren't complaining. 

The first order of business was repopulating the yards. I took the noble F1 split from Elk Grove to Weimar and set it up there. The fence on the other side of the yard where the Kona F2 daughter was blew over so I relocated that hive to Davis, it was a strong 2 deeps by then. This left Elk Grove with just one hive at the time, but the original Noble Apiaries queen was pretty much a full two deeps and a medium by March so I made a walk away split to get the hive count back up to two there. I also made another split and took it to the main yard in Woodland since the hive had rebounded so well from the 4-5 frames it had in December. I also made a split from the Kona F2 before moving the hive to Davis as I realized she was going into her third year and although not mite resistant was a very good queen and perhaps I could get some VSH integrated into a daughter. 

2015 queen orders... I ordered an II breeder from Harbo. I also was put onto Bill Carpenter's mite maulers, I ordered 5 regular queens and a breeder quality queen. I ordered 6 queens from Old Sol, 3 Caucasian, 2 select and one standard queen. Late in the year Anarchy Apiaries was advertising queens so I ordered 5 queens there. I also ordered 2 queens from Michael Palmer from the Caspian line he had received, again, this was later in the year. I believe that was it for the year, I really wanted to focus on making daughters from what I had, especially the VP queens but time was just too short, especially with the baby.


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## JRG13

Early Spring, around April most of the hives were looking pretty good. The only bees that seemed to be lagging were the queens from Broke-T. I can't even say they were duds, but the colonies seemed to have hit a wall around 5-6 frames of bees, and mind you they overwintered with 2-3 frames of bees and always had nice brood patterns on a few frames. They did start getting a little spotty though, but mite pressure was not overtly noticeable but I decided to give them a spring Apivar treatment just to see if it would help and it seemed to improve things somewhat. Daughter of Super Queen had inherited the same broodiness her mother had and was quickly occupying 2 deeps and a medium. By a chance inspection, I found Swarm Mama ready to hit the trees one day as well, either late March or early April... she had 17 queencells on 4 frames so I split her down 4 ways. I nuc'd her and split the cells up into 3 splits. The split that was the original hive failed to requeen so I gave them a frame of eggs and larva from their mother and they were able to successfully requeen after that. One of the splits had another case of wingless queen syndrome post mating but she's proved to be a decent queen and again, one of those ones I don't have to worry about swarming so it's a win win I guess.

The first queens to arrive for the season were the Bill Carpenter queens. Very nice looking queens, mostly Italian looking but the breeder quality queen definitely has some Carniolan blood in her or the drones she mated with. Of the 5 standard queens, 4 were introduced successfully, the 5th would've been ok, but I let her out of the cage a few days after introduction as the other 4 queens were already out and about and although she wasn't balled directly, the bees harassed her a lot and she took off flying when I checked on her a couple days later and that another $30 down the tubes.... You think you'd learn after a few years, but I guess there's always that feeling that you get, like, I know the bees are ready.... well, like I said before, just ignore that feeling, or better yet, every time you goof up, just take the amount of money that queen cost you and throw it in a jar, use it to keep things in perspective at years end....

Anyways, off to pick up the kids!


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## kilocharlie

RayMarler said:


> Yes, All I have on this is guess work from observations as well. Hopefully it will lead us both and everyone to further insights and more successful beekeeping management.
> 
> Yes, it may be good in the spring, but when the hive starts backfilling the drone cells and drones die off or leave or get booted, it sure does cause a large heavy hit on the worker brood. Treatments or splits or splits with treatments in timing with this can be very beneficial to controlling mite numbers in summer, I'm betting. In my area I'm noticing this starting around middle of June, perhaps due to solstice and lack of enough good forage.


(that was post #44 of this thread)

*Ray* - my take on this is that if you used sacrificial drone combs and pulled them about day 20 and froze them, you'll likely have much less "mite transfer" to the worker brood soon after...???

If this is combined with mite mauling bees and a full brood break, you may have no harsh mite treatment in mid-August necessary...

Any one already doing this, or close to it? I think Lauri Miller is close to this, but I do not know whether he has mite mauling bees or not...

Herein could be the key to treatment free beekeeping, the slipknot would probably be mites that go early to worker brood. An artificial brood break could turn the tide on the little bastards (mites).

*JRG* - I'm reading about your 2013 bees "mean, antsy, runny, drippy" - they strike me as watered-down AHB crosses. Any chance that stock survives? If so, I'd check their queen and worker emergence times. If queens emerge on day 13/14, and the workers on day 19, they're probably partly Africanized. Select for the 19 day worker brood trait (mite tolerance), and try your dang'dest to cross them with mite mauling trait.


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## RayMarler

Yes KC, is my plans this year to use green pierco drone frames to manage the drones. Last year was bad from all of the foundationless frames I'd had from the year before, resulting in drone comb here and there and everywhere. I've been culling those and going back to all plastic foundation again. With all plastic foundation the bees won't be apt to remake combs into drone comb as badly as they did with foundationless, and by using the green pierco frames it'll be a snap to manage the drones.

Ten years ago I was using powder sugar dusting and drone comb removal. It worked fairly well back then. I'm going to start using drone brood management again this year and see if I can greatly reduce or eliminate treating. I'm not going back to powder sugar dusting though, as it drawbacks of it's own that I do not wish to deal with here.

I will have to work in drone brood management for varroa control as well as queen rearing though, but I'm sure I can come up with a good plan for greater success of both.


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## JRG13

I have a few F1 daughters and an F2 still KC, the fate of swarm mama will be told in 2016....


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## JRG13

Well lets get back to it.... and for those of you wondering, I'm recounting all this from memory, I don't really take notes as there just quite frankly isn't much time to do it. Although, when I bought some hives last year, I did take some notes on them, more so to help me bring enough extra boxes for them on the next visit but I found the notes helpful except I ended up tossing them and then at the end of the season I found myself thinking those would've been good to have as reference for the final inspections...

Bill Carpenter's bees turned out to be pretty gentle, I had a little trepidation as they were coming out of Florida but they seemed to be as gentle as the rest of the bees I've gotten. I quickly identified one of the 4 remaining standard queens as being better than the rest and the breeder seemed to be doing well also. One of them ended up being superceded fairly quickly though, I made a split trying to save her but it ended up queenless. I donated a frame of eggs and larva from the best queen of the bunch and they successfully requeened themselves. 

The VSH Italian X Pure VSH VP breeder looked very good as well. Very nice brood pattern. Since timed was kind of short, I ended up loaning her out to Noble Apiaries to graft some queens for me. I wanted to focus on increasing and evaluating some of the other stocks I had, but time was always short with the new baby and having to move in May. The Carni breeder was doing well also, slowly building up in spring as they didn't overwinter very strong but were looking like decent bees. The hive was very uniform in appearance and very pure carni looking which was impressive as you don't see too many pure looking hives these days.

I left the Cordovan swarm queen alone, they barely pulled through but were slowly building back up from 1-2 frames of bees. The Monsanto Swarm queen ended up building back well also. I think by mid season they were a 5x5x5. I ended up making a split off them and transferring to the new house. Damaged Mama ended up getting superceded but the bees didn't kill her, I found them as a two queen hive early in the season. Interesting enough, she had a very uniform colony appearance as well. All the bees were your basic striped Italians, all looking exactly the same so I capitalized on that. I think when picking breeders for trait integration evaluations, uniformity is a good trait to look for in a hive. Not to say just because the bees in the colony look identical, that they absolutely similar in other traits, but I think it points out she had limited mating with similar drones or perhaps just drones from a single colony. Her daughter looked just like her though so it was kind of funny when I first saw her because I was like, hey, there you are and you've healed up but then on the next frame it was like, nevermind, that was your daughter apparently... I ended up splitting the damaged queen off and she ended up getting superceded again, so I split her off again and on that third split I had to let her go when they decided to supercede as there just wasn't enough bees to make another nuc. In the end, all 3 queens looked exactly the same as their mom, just nice rootbeer reddish queens, no stripes.

Good stopping point for now, I'll add more later tonight.


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## aunt betty

@JRG13.
Saw you complaining about headaches and have a suggestion that may help you. I used to get terrible migraine allergy related headaches too. I'd go thru two or three bottle of that pseudo epinephrin which I have to go sign for. There's a limit you can get and had to actually get someone else to go buy the over the counter meds for me or I'd get accused of manufacturing something or other.

And then I got bees. Once I was around bees, honey, and pollen I quit having headaches almost completely. 
Maybe if you'd save honey from each season with the intent of using it next season to sort of boost your immunity it'd help? We tell our allergy customers that. Estimate that about 15 to 25% of my customers are using my honey like medicine. They tell me that anyway. 
I eat a little bit of honey every time I get the urge and so far that's what is immunizing me to allergy headaches. 
Really hope this helps you.


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## JRG13

I'll may start ingesting more honey, but my migraines are typically triggered with pressure changes. I'm typically fine all year until fall usually when the winds or storms come and then it'll clear after some time and once spring hits I rarely worry about them anymore.


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## Juhani Lunden

JRG13 said:


> I'll may start ingesting more honey, but my migraines are typically triggered with pressure changes. I'm typically fine all year until fall usually when the winds or storms come and then it'll clear after some time and once spring hits I rarely worry about them anymore.


My wife gets headache just when strong low pressure is coming above Stockholm (in Sweden), some 400km from here.


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## AR1

posting to follow.


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## soarwitheagles

Well done thread everyone...gosh JRG, after reading this thread I think it is possible you have experimented with a greater variety of queen bees than anyone else on the planet! Good job and please keep posting your results and experiences. 

Ok, I have a question...

What are your 3 favorite queens and why are they your favorites?

BTW, that aggressive hive settled down and I just pulled 9 queen cells from the queen in the Nicot. Should have another 30-40 larvae for queens by this Saturday. Can't wait to see how they perform and I will gladly give you some queens if you like. Fastest building hive we have ever had here...best of all, mites are nearly non-existent! Who knows, she may be one of the daughters or granddaughters of one of the queens you brought over here!

Cheers!


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## JRG13

One day I'll get back to this thread, time is short these days and I was having some minor but painful health issues.


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## AR1

Jut re-read the thread, and it seems to me a couple of things pop out. 
First, that food resources seem to have a large effect. The colonies that had good feed also resisted mites better. Not surprising if true. Do you see that?

Then, that some colonies had periods where they showed a lot of mites but rebounded and survived in spite of it.

I am a real neophyte, so 99% of what I know is from reading, not experience. I am wondering if counting mites is only useful for researchers, and not so much for people trying to produce mite-resistant colonies. If a colony has a high mite count on one inspection, but still survives, did it really need treatment? Maybe a zero mite count isn't what we should be looking for, but colonies that deal with the mites and survive anyway. 

Virus resistance is different from mite resistance, so a colony could have mites but not be susceptible to a virus, and tolerate higher mite loads. Another colony might fight mites directly, and survive that way by keeping mite count low. Just measuring mite count might be missing some valuable traits.

If we treat every colony with high mite loads, we'll slow progress. Honey producers and pollinators need to treat, obviously, because those bees are cattle, and need to meet production goals to be worth the expense of keeping. But if you step back and are trying to produce tolerant/resistant stock, it seems to me that treating will slow your progress. 

Not arguing for hard-core hard bond here. Cali is a tough environment for TF, and it would be hard to have enough survivors to keep going with all the drones from treated hives swamping you every year. I find your posts very interesting and look forward to new installments. Hope you are feeling better soon.


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## Juhani Lunden

AR1 said:


> I am wondering if counting mites is only useful for researchers, and not so much for people trying to produce mite-resistant colonies. If a colony has a high mite count on one inspection, but still survives, did it really need treatment? Maybe a zero mite count isn't what we should be looking for, but colonies that deal with the mites and survive anyway.


A long term mite increase (decrease) can be measured from the results of several mites counts, how many % a month/year. 

There is absolutely no information for breeding purposes in a single count result.


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## WesternWilson

AR1 said:


> Jut re-read the thread, and it seems to me a couple of things pop out.
> First, that food resources seem to have a large effect. The colonies that had good feed also resisted mites better. Not surprising if true. Do you see that?
> 
> T


From my area and experience, no. Mites actually do very well in booming, well fed colonies because the increased brooding drives exponential mite reproduction.

"If we treat every colony with high mite loads"...in my area (bee dense, lots of medicated pollination bees) ALL bees have high mite loads. It is not a function of fitness but of overwhelming infestation. And if the high loads are not dealt with, the colonies weaken, are unproductive, and die.

The answer for Varroa will not, IMHO, come from backyard/small holding survivor beeyards, and if you are running a survivor beeyard in the flight range of other beekeepers, you are spreading, not remediating, the Varroa grief.

I understand that we want to get past the Varroa impact, but I would like new beekeepers to keep bees "plain vanilla style" for a few years so they see what a really healthy colony looks like through the year. After that they can experiment, out of the flight range of other beekeepers, and they have a yardstick to compare their experimental results to.

It is possible, maybe probable, that the bee genome is not flexible enough to withstand Varroa pressure.


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## JRG13

I haven't really sampled mite numbers yet, I just look at the impact they have on the hives throughout the year. I have yet to see any hives capable of withstanding even moderate levels of mites here. What I do see if as the genetics have shifted towards more VSH, these hive simply crash later in the year than the really susceptible hives. I did have a swarm last year that looked promising but ended up superceding later in the year then had queen issues during our periods of long rains, high winds, with limited flight days inbetween. They stayed strong all year but I could tell the mites were increasing in fall and the brood pattern started to deteriorate but the hive did not crash and were looking pretty good until I found them queenless a few weeks ago with just a handful of bees where in the previous inspection there were still about 16 frames of bees..... I figured the late mated queen failed or they superceded due to high mite pressure doing one of the stormy periods and the virgin disappeared at some point.


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## WesternWilson

JRG13 said:


> I have yet to see any hives capable of withstanding even moderate levels of mites here. What I do see if as the genetics have shifted towards more VSH, these hive simply crash later in the year than the really susceptible hives.


This points up one of the main issues with the many programs aimed at finding Varroa resistance...they do not yield meaningful resistance. 

For the kind of carnage involved in survivor bee programs to be worth it (and worth the substantial genetic bottleneck involved), the bees at the other end must be not just kinda resistant, but Varroa-proof. They must be so good with the Varroa that we can drop treatment frequency if not treatments altogether. And the situation I often encounter when visiting treatment free yards, where in exchange for enduring Varroa loads the beekeeper accepts reduced colony size, vigour, health and productivity is also not an acceptable trade-off.

The usual rebuttal is that these situations indicate we are making progress toward that truly Varroa-proof bee. I am not so sure. Given the long standing lack of progress toward the end goal, I wonder if we have pushed the bee genome as far as it can go on this road (which unfortunately is not far enough). I am encouraged by the fact that Varroa are now being cultured in a couple of USA labs, so research into the Varroa life cycle and genome can now proceed more rapidly. It should be easier to short-circuit the Varroa than to produce a widely available super bee.


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## AR1

Yikes. I may have derailed this very interesting thread into a TF vs Treat argument. NOT my intention. I was all set to chime in again, then I remembered threads that went haywire over just this issue. Sorry folks. Appreciate the answers and will hold my thoughts for a TF thread.


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## JRG13

Don't sweat it AR1, the whole point of this thread is to generate discussion. Western Wilson, let me be clear on one thing, I'm not trying to 'find' resistance here. I'm building a population of bees which I will begin doing some actual breeding with to see if I can actually drive improvements with the Varroa issue in our area. I'm also doing a little networking with a local commercial Beesource member as well to see how well some of the lines I'm looking at perform in that aspect (i.e. almond pollination) in the F1's or first generation daughter queens from some of the breeders. We're not expecting anything to be bullet proof yet, but if we can see improvement in survivability or better sustained populations come January due to lessening the impact of varroa via improved genetics and how they interact/combine with our current stocks, I would dare call it making progress.


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## WesternWilson

JRG13 said:


> . Western Wilson, let me be clear on one thing, I'm not trying to 'find' resistance here. I'm building a population of bees which I will begin doing some actual breeding with to see if I can actually drive improvements with the Varroa issue in our area.


Fair enough. The only caveat being whether running TF is causing an impact on any nearby beekeepers. The year two TF survivor yards entered my area, mite counts went through the roof. 

It will be interesting as well to follow Randy Oliver's project this year, to identify and breed from colonies that display Varroa resistance. I certainly hope it can be done, and done such that we do not end up with bees that look like bees but act like wasps (non productive and ornery).

We'd all like Varroa proof bees, I just wonder if the bee genome has that in it.


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## Riverderwent

WesternWilson said:


> I certainly hope it can be done, and done such that we do not end up with bees that look like bees but act like wasps (non productive and ornery).
> 
> We'd all like Varroa proof bees, I just wonder if the bee genome has that in it.


Unlink the genetic linkage disequilibrium of defensiveness and varroa resistance in scutellata. Easy enough, right? In temperate zones, natural selection should favor the unlinkage because of the survival costs associated with unneeded defensive traits such as surplus guard bees who could otherwise be foraging. And artificial breeding should likewise favor the unlinkage because beekeepers don't like defensiveness but do like varroa resistance and varroa tolerance. Can the traits be unlinked? Probably. Look at Puerto Rico, maybe.


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## gww

western.....


> Fair enough. The only caveat being whether running TF is causing an impact on any nearby beekeepers. The year two TF survivor yards entered my area, mite counts went through the roof.
> 
> It will be interesting as well to follow Randy Oliver's project this year, to identify and breed from colonies that display Varroa resistance. I certainly hope it can be done, and done such that we do not end up with bees that look like bees but act like wasps (non productive and ornery).
> 
> We'd all like Varroa proof bees, I just wonder if the bee genome has that in it.


If the two year TF survivor yards make it through year 3 and 4 maby it will be in the genome. Most swarms probly have the same effect in your aria as far as mites go. 
Cheers
gww


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## WesternWilson

Riverderwent said:


> Unlink the genetic linkage disequilibrium of defensiveness and varroa resistance in scutellata. Easy enough, right? In temperate zones, natural selection should favor the unlinkage because of the survival costs associated with unneeded defensive traits such as surplus guard bees who could otherwise be foraging. And artificial breeding should likewise favor the unlinkage because beekeepers don't like defensiveness but do like varroa resistance and varroa tolerance. Can the traits be unlinked? Probably. Look at Puerto Rico, maybe.


I will leave that to the experts! I am not going to take on survivor beeyards, and troll through the deadouts looking for the one Miracle Queen. And the logistics of replicating her to stock all the beeyards...that's also a tall and demanding order.

I do not mean to sound cynical, and I will be happy to buy Varroa-proof bees if and when they are not only discovered but made widely available. But I am the person who answers the emergency calls around here from new beekeepers who don't get why their hives keep dying year after year. Nobody tells them that going treatment free is not an entry level endeavour. Suggesting they do this is like asking them to mount a successful manned mission to Mars, in an easy-to-copy format, in six months, all from their back yard. 

So, not trying to offend, but finding the Varroa proof bee is proving to be a lot more challenging than was originally thought. I think our answer will be found in studying and manipulating mites, not bees.


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## JRG13

Western, I agree with a lot of your points on how to get from A to B w/o sacrificing a large part of the operation. Sadly, I do suffer a fair amount of losses due to treating late and doing some preliminary evaluations and sometimes just not having enough time to feed as much as needed. To be clear, there's nothing treatment free about what's going on with my bees, except I really limit myself to a fall treatment, which is looking like it needs to be more of a summer treatment these days. That being said, there are some 'gems' out there that seem to do well and I believe I'm seeing a shift towards slightly more tolerant than baseline susceptibility.


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## Oldtimer

JRG13 said:


> I'm also doing a little networking with a local commercial Beesource member as well to see how well some of the lines I'm looking at perform in that aspect (i.e. almond pollination) in the F1's or first generation daughter queens from some of the breeders.


Sounds like a great project JRG13. Please update in time, good or bad.


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## WesternWilson

gww said:


> If the two year TF survivor yards make it through year 3 and 4 maby it will be in the genome. Most swarms probly have the same effect in your aria as far as mites go.
> Cheers
> gww


Both yards died out within 18 months. I was sorry for their bees, but relieved for mine. Alas almost every year, somebody pops up in the area who is new to beekeeping and thinks survivor yards are the way to go. I don't think they are evil, but they are ignorant of the impact they have on others.


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## gww

western


> I don't think they are evil, but they are ignorant of the impact they have on others.


I am one of them newbees but might not be in 18 months.

So far so good. The guy I bought from also does not treat and lives about 1.5 miles from me. I do believe you on your mentoring of poeple and what you are seeing. I don't buy the impact on others around as being that big and definatly those guys with 3 through ten back yard hives, compared to the big guys that might treat and be by them.

Every single thing that I read seems to show that all hives have some mites and it is how much brood they are making in the hive that is causing overload. When you treat, you knock that overload down but don't get rid of mites.

I am new but am trying to understand better. Right now I think the finger pointing except in exceptional situations just does not add up with everything I think I know now. I do think that even if I decide to start treating, that the guy that is 1.5 miles away from me will not affect me more then the swarms I am catching in my traps and also the ones that I know are there but don't pick my traps.

I do see you answering questions on here from guys like me and believe most of your advice seems very well grounded and so my post is more on where my understanding is at this point in time on this one thing and not a question at all on your knowlage of bee keeping.
Cheers
gww


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## Riverderwent

WesternWilson said:


> It is possible, maybe probable, that the bee genome is not flexible enough to withstand Varroa pressure.


“The populations reviewed here demonstrate that mite resistance is possible for A. mellifera honeybees around the world (Figure 1) and that there are multiple genetic adaptive routes to achieving a sustainable mite resistance (Table I)." Locke, B. Apidologie (2016) 47: 467. doi:10.1007/s13592-015-0412-8, http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13592-015-0412-8


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## Scottsbee

JRG13,
Great read. Maybe I missed it, how are the Old Sol bees doing? Did there survivor Queen survive? 

Purchased a Caucasian Nuc from them this spring and curious how yours are faring. 

Keep up the good work!!


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## soarwitheagles

delete please


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## soarwitheagles

JRG,

Not wanting to throw a wrench into this entire concept of TF bees...but...

As you know, every late summer/early fall we have experienced what I think can be called heavy to massive mite load. And for us, we tried OA vaporization, had some good to mediocre results.

Without treatment, I am certain every hive would have quickly died out.

Fast forward to this year. Our bee yard grew from 5 to nearly 50 this year, with much of the increase coming from what is probably swarms originating from commercial beekeepers colonies. Then we made lots of nucs that got to mate with the local drones. Results: Most hives have nearly no mites at all. In some hives, I cannot find any mites on the bees or on the sticky bottom board. Quite a difference from the last 3 years when, at times, we would find over 300 mites per day on the SSB.

Is it possible in our case that a change in the strain of bees had a lot to do with the reduced mite load. Am I correct in thinking this way? Hives are still building up, and, although they let up a little on egg laying, still growing.

Are we capitalizing on other beeks hard work to raise queens that truly do have mite resistant qualities, or is this simply a stroke of luck?

Mite load is so radically changed, trying to figure this one out!

Yo, help us out here!


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## JRG13

I'll try to revive this thread at some point, might just have to jump to this year as a recap. Scottsbee, I think out of the 5 or six queens I ordered, one made it, but it was a tough time to intro queens. Wasn't a caucasian though. Overwintered into 2016, found a mother/virgin daughter combination early spring, split off the mother. Neither one built up much but both overwintered into 2017. The mother queen was superceded this year but failed to requeen, the daughter was ok, but nothing great but I kind of thought they were doing ok and didn't mess with them too much. I should've looked more closely, hive was very uniform in appearance, I should've made some daughters off her as I'm betting they would've been quite uniform for a good comparison, but they tried superceding her multiple times, I just let it happen but I dunno, I would find hatched cells but she must've been good at killing virgins or something. A few weeks ago there was some nice cells, and I found her just kind of trying to fly and run around the frames, she fell off at some point and I could not find her so that was the end of that, and there's a decent new queen laying pretty good now, but I did have to treat them to overwinter, the mites built up on them pretty fast.

Soar, this year seems odd, I'm not seeing heavy mite loads yet, but don't let em fool you....


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## BeeHopper

I don't get it. If your not doing counts or taking notes and treating how are you exactly suppose achieve resistance? What kind of breeding program do you have? Granted, I understand that treating is to protect your investment. That is fine, all colonies don't have to die. But what I really don't understand is why are you not doing washes? Why are you buying "breeders" from all over the country? Your going about what your trying to achieve ass backwards. 
Breeding for resistance is very straight forward. Take whatever bees (they don't have to be breeders) you have with the lowest counts and breed from survivors of those every year. Start grafting. Making walk away splits and waiting for them to draw cells from a hosh posh of bees from all over the country isn't the way to find resistance. Get your ducks in a row or quit pretending. It will save you money, time, and stress in the long run.


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## JRG13

BeeHopper said:


> I don't get it. If your not doing counts or taking notes and treating how are you exactly suppose achieve resistance? What kind of breeding program do you have? Granted, I understand that treating is to protect your investment. That is fine, all colonies don't have to die. But what I really don't understand is why are you not doing washes? Why are you buying "breeders" from all over the country? Your going about what your trying to achieve ass backwards.
> Breeding for resistance is very straight forward. Take whatever bees (they don't have to be breeders) you have with the lowest counts and breed from survivors of those every year. Start grafting. Making walk away splits and waiting for them to draw cells from a hosh posh of bees from all over the country isn't the way to find resistance. Get your ducks in a row or quit pretending. It will save you money, time, and stress in the long run.


It's so straight forward everyone should have resistant bees then... Honestly, I'm not at the point to really take data, I'm just building up so I can actually run efficient tests w/o losing my butt and taking meaningful data. I could perform washes but I haven't really run many hives as 'production' hives. Right now, they all donate splits throughout the season or started off as a nuc or may even be maintained as a nuc to donate a frame of brood here and there. I'm not running some backyard breeding operation trying to extract a few gallons of honey. I'm looking at bees that do well in more of a commercial setting for almond pollination and then maintaining strong build up under our not so ideal conditions at times. Also, I pick up details just by looking at the colonies during inspection, I don't need an alcohol wash to tell me something I already know at this point.

When I'm ready to take data I will set up production colonies with known lineage/combinations to compare with each other and they will be tracked over the course of 2-3 seasons at least. Year one will be just building up to about two deeps, treated, then overwintered into almond pollination. Cluster size and behavior traits will be looked at during pollination. After almonds they'll go into honey production and boxes will be added as needed. This is when mite data will be taken as well, exceptional colonies will be noted and remain untreated. Poor colonies will be treated and removed from the breeding pool. The next round of candidates will be getting ready to test in the following year alongside the rest.

Collecting germplasm is just my hobby part of the whole experience, it's what I enjoy. Also, what breeding program doesn't look at and evaluate a wide range of germplasm, I'd be stupid not too. Also, there's some niche markets available around here, and having an array of backgrounds will help fill them. I can offer Cordovan queens, Italian queens, carniolan queens. Will bring in a Caucasian breeder next year. I was able to bring in some Zia queens this year, may have some solid mite resistance already, but time will tell now won't it. On the flipside, I try to support BS members as much as I can on buying queens from them and passing along any good words I have for them. It's how I give back to the Beesource Community and I get to test some new bees out to boot.


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## ShrekVa

JRG13 said:


> I pick up details just by looking at the colonies during inspection, I don't need an alcohol wash to tell me something I already know at this point.


I agree, and good luck.


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## msl

soarwitheagles said:


> Is it possible in our case that a change in the strain of bees had a lot to do with the reduced mite load. Am I correct in thinking this way?


My guess would be the change in management, swarms and splits have a large impact on mite loads
the concept of OTS is based on this and people are perfectly able to keep normal nonresistant bees alive with out chemicals.
Here is a model of the effect


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## 1102009

JRG13 said:


> Also, I pick up details just by looking at the colonies during inspection, I don't need an alcohol wash to tell me something I already know at this point.
> 
> When I'm ready to take data I will set up production colonies with known lineage/combinations to compare with each other and they will be tracked over the course of 2-3 seasons at least. Year one will be just building up to about two deeps, treated, then overwintered into almond pollination. Cluster size and behavior traits will be looked at during pollination. After almonds they'll go into honey production and boxes will be added as needed. This is when mite data will be taken as well, exceptional colonies will be noted and remain untreated. Poor colonies will be treated and removed from the breeding pool. The next round of candidates will be getting ready to test in the following year alongside the rest.


:thumbsup:

It´s a matter of time and patience.



> Fast forward to this year. Our bee yard grew from 5 to nearly 50 this year, with much of the increase coming from what is probably swarms originating from commercial beekeepers colonies. Then we made lots of nucs that got to mate with the local drones. Results: Most hives have nearly no mites at all. In some hives, I cannot find any mites on the bees or on the sticky bottom board. Quite a difference from the last 3 years when, at times, we would find over 300 mites per day on the SSB.


Same here. This situation means nothing though. Wait one more season until you have established production colonies or stronger nucs.


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## Juhani Lunden

msl said:


> the concept of OTS is based on this


What is OTS concept?


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## msl

http://www.mdasplitter.com/docs/OTS.pdf


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## squarepeg

i hope this finds you and yours doing well jrg, and here's wishing you and all the membership a healthy and successful 2020! 

if you get a chance would it be possible to give us a recap of your progress or lack thereof over the past couple of years when it comes to your journey toward finding mite resistance?


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## JRG13

I gave it up..... LOL, j/k. I can, I've been so busy with work and stuff haven't had time, but 2019 wasn't too bad. I can start giving a recap and progress report from then on.


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## squarepeg

understood jrg. 

we are definitely interested and looking forward forward to your recap. 

many thanks!


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## CliffS

Hello, Im a beekeeper in Coastal California, I've been looking for a relatively local source of high quality queens. Any recommendations?


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## soarwitheagles

JRG,

Geez,

It is 2022!

Well, how are your honeybees doing now? I know you are busy, but, have you introduced any new queens lately and how's your bee yards coming along?


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## RayMarler

CliffS said:


> Hello, Im a beekeeper in Coastal California, I've been looking for a relatively local source of high quality queens. Any recommendations?


I am very happy with WildFlower Meadows queens.








Optimum Genetics - Wildflower Meadows


Read More



wildflowermeadows.com




I do treat, but these bees do better for me than many others that I've tried.
I've been running these for the past 3 years now and do not plan to change.


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## JRG13

Happy Holidays everyone,

I plan on reviving this thread this year. Still at it but not as intense the last few years during covid etc.... Haven't really evaluated many new stocks but have been collecting swarms and doing removals each year (between 60-100 each year since 2018 or so) so I am still getting a chance to see what's out there locally at least. Still don't see much holding up here though, tried some different VSH stocks this year but all the daughter queens mited out by Sept 1st so that was kind of disapointing.


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## GregB

JRG13 said:


> Still don't see much holding up here though, *tried some different VSH stocks this year but all the daughter queens mited out by Sept 1st so that was kind of disapointing.*


Typical for me too - outcrossing kills the VSH rather quickly.
BUT - the Reduced Treatment approach seems to work.


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## NUBE

JRG13 said:


> Happy Holidays everyone,
> 
> I plan on reviving this thread this year. Still at it but not as intense the last few years during covid etc.... Haven't really evaluated many new stocks but have been collecting swarms and doing removals each year (between 60-100 each year since 2018 or so) so I am still getting a chance to see what's out there locally at least. Still don't see much holding up here though, tried some different VSH stocks this year but all the daughter queens mited out by Sept 1st so that was kind of disapointing.


I’m certainly hoping you’ll give us some updates. Very interesting thread.


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