# OAV or MAQS?



## clyderoad (Jun 10, 2012)

MAQS on all and follow up with OAV in November.

The clock is ticking for healthy winter bees in the Northern States.


----------



## snl (Nov 20, 2009)

Since I suspect you have brood, if you don't mind doing multiple treatments, you can use OAV only. I'd do 4 treatments, 5 days apart.


----------



## Kuro (Jun 18, 2015)

clyderoad said:


> MAQS on all and follow up with OAV in November.
> 
> The clock is ticking for healthy winter bees in the Northern States.


I agree, if you do MAQS now, the majority of mites will be dead within a few days (vs a round of OAV with brood will gradually reduce mite# over a few weeks).


----------



## idlemere (Sep 25, 2017)

Kuro said:


> I agree, if you do MAQS now, the majority of mites will be dead within a few days (vs a round of OAV with brood will gradually reduce mite# over a few weeks).


So, would you go with the 7-day MAQS vs the milder 21-day treatment? I was leaning towards the 21-day, followed by a single OAV in late November.


----------



## ericweller (Jan 10, 2013)

It seems a bit too late to be doing mite treatments for MI. I do my treatments in the first or second week of August and I am in GA. I would think you would need to do your treatments sometime in July. Don't get me wrong. Treating this late is better than not treating at all but the goal is to have the bees treated before the winter bees are are raised. When i first started beekeeping, I waited until the first or second week of September to treat and still had significant losses. I moved my treatments to August and have had much better results.
FWIW.


----------



## idlemere (Sep 25, 2017)

I agree, it is late to do treatments here. But I was only getting 1-2 mites per 300 bees even on 8/27. The previous two years, I just automatically treated with MAQS in August, without ever doing a mite count. This year I decided to do mite counts every few weeks, only to find that I am now too late. It is all a learning experience, and next year I will know better. But for my current situation, I think that any treatment will give a better chance of survival than no treatment.


----------



## Kuro (Jun 18, 2015)

idlemere said:


> So, would you go with the 7-day MAQS vs the milder 21-day treatment? I was leaning towards the 21-day, followed by a single OAV in late November.


In my first year, I treated one hive with the full dose (2 pads) and another with half doses 14 days apart. Both worked, in terms of killing mites. Also, I did not see much difference in # of dead bees around the hives on the 2nd day of treatment. Both colonies survived after OAV treatment in winter. This year, I only did the full dose. Maybe somebody who has more experience can tell the difference between the two methods.


----------



## Phoebee (Jan 29, 2014)

clyderoad said:


> MAQS on all and follow up with OAV in November.
> 
> The clock is ticking for healthy winter bees in the Northern States.


+1. The half-dose method on the MAQS instruction sheet may be plenty, since the load is not all that bad at the moment, and you don't want to set back winter bee brood.


----------



## Phoebee (Jan 29, 2014)

Kuro said:


> In my first year, I treated one hive with the full dose (2 pads) and another with half doses 14 days apart. Both worked, in terms of killing mites. Also, I did not see much difference in # of dead bees around the hives on the 2nd day of treatment. Both colonies survived after OAV treatment in winter. This year, I only did the full dose. Maybe somebody who has more experience can tell the difference between the two methods.


Some people here have reported a lot of bees, including queens, killed by full strength MAQS treatments. I've never had a queen killed. We've had some brood removed following treatment but that may just be hygenic cleanup of varroa-invested pupae. We do put a pad soaked with about 15 ml of Honey Bee Healthy with any formic acid treatment to hopefully reduce the chance of the queen being balled. This comes from a liquid FA treatment method developed by a crew at West Virginia University. 

The half-dose option, with the HBH pads, should be more easily tolerated, and if the infestation is light, should be plenty to carry the hive to when it is broodless, providing you're in a climate where they do go broodless (sorry, Texas and Florida). A single half-dose MAQS treatment now (we did it in August) followed by one shot of OAV when broodless should be a disaster for the mites. Do a mite count after treatment to confirm you killed enough of them.


----------



## ericweller (Jan 10, 2013)

I treat first or second week of August without doing mite counts. After doing sticky board counts for years, I go under the assumption that all of my hives have mites because they all did in the past. I rotate treatment methods occasionally using OAV or ApiLife Var.


----------



## Phoebee (Jan 29, 2014)

ericweller said:


> I treat first or second week of August without doing mite counts. After doing sticky board counts for years, I go under the assumption that all of my hives have mites because they all did in the past. I rotate treatment methods occasionally using OAV or ApiLife Var.


This year our hives were rarely dropping any mites on the sticky boards. I did one sugar roll on one hive because, dang it, I thought I oughta. The count was zero. But on your same belief that there must be mites, we did the half-dose MAQS treatment. Which dropped next to nothing on most of the hives, a few hundred on the strongest. This we believe is the result of OAV on all the hives last December, our relative isolation, and starting out with some pretty good bees.

This year we're just mopping up, with hopes of at least temporarily exterminating the nasty things. So I might recommend, after your campaign this year, to do some counts next year. They may not reveal much, but think of how satisfying it will be to find that you don't have the mites you assumed you would based on past experience! Your circumstances may not allow such a good result, but it can work.


----------



## vdotmatrix (Apr 5, 2014)

I stay away from MAQS in the fall when I am trying to rear "winter Bees". As you know MAQS kills open brood, young bees and sometimes associated with queen death....Do you really want any of that going on in late October??????

Oh hell No.

In the late fall I do the OAV every 5 days for 4-5 treatments until I see an anticipated decrease in the mite drop. YES I count every last mite and put in in a spread sheet and plot the data.


----------

