# Hop Guard 2



## swarm_trapper (Jun 19, 2003)

We tried a few pallets on someone who had some very mitey bees, the the pallet that we rolled varied from 25-40 in a wash of 300 bees. Two weeks after we put the hopguard in they were down to 4-7 in a roll. I havn't been back to check on them since. The mites were getting them pretty bad so their wasnt much brood either maybe 3 frames of spotty stuff. It looks like a viable option.


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## acbz (Sep 8, 2009)

Did some mite roll checkbacks on yard I treated with HG2 a couple weeks ago and found lots of mites. More mites than I've seen in a long time in the samples. I'm thinking that I either got a bad batch, or my mites really like hops. One more yard treated with HG2 to recheck in a week.


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## jim lyon (Feb 19, 2006)

I treated about 1500 hives late August by putting 2 strips under the excluder in hives with one medium above the excluder. Killed lots of mites and didn't seem to harm the bees at all but 3 weeks later mite counts remained at unacceptable levels. My conclusion is that it's a good product in that it is food safe and serves the puspose of knocking down levels quite a bit early but that some sort of follow up is pretty much mandatory. I think the ideal use of this product may be I treating 4 to 5 comb nucs in the spring.


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## Roland (Dec 14, 2008)

Jim, what if you treated just as the last northern brood was about to hatch, but before you moved them south?

Crazy Roland


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## acbz (Sep 8, 2009)

Roland said:


> Jim, what if you treated just as the last northern brood was about to hatch, but before you moved them south?
> 
> Crazy Roland


If I could wait to treat until just before they go broodless, I'd save myself a lot of money and just use oxalic.


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## Roland (Dec 14, 2008)

ACBZ - do your hives ever go broodless in Florida?

Crazy Roland


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## jim lyon (Feb 19, 2006)

Roland said:


> Jim, what if you treated just as the last northern brood was about to hatch, but before you moved them south?
> 
> Crazy Roland


If you are talking about waiting that long for the initial treatment, we've done that a few times not by design but simply because we didn't get our work done in time.....it always seemed to end badly. If you are suggesting waiting on the second treatment until just before shipment we had some late second treatments this year that actually fared pretty well though not as good as those treated earlier. 
I've spent the past week and a half unloading bees in Texas and evaluating their size and mite numbers. Really pleased with what I'm seeing. Perhaps our best bees were doubles that had a thymomite strip place between the chambers in late August, a follow up strip 2 to 3 weeks later and a late oxalic trickle in October. A lot of those are a good 16 to 18 frames of bees with hardly a mite to be found.


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## acbz (Sep 8, 2009)

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Roland said:


> ACBZ - do your hives ever go broodless in Florida?
> 
> Crazy Roland


Not really, they will get down to a brood minimum in late Nov. to early Dec., but not broodless like the load of bees that just came down from WI.


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## jim lyon (Feb 19, 2006)

Randy Oliver just published an article in the December ABJ showing results of his trial of Hopguard 2 as a late summer mite treatment. The results were quite interesting and pretty much mirrored my experience, at least in the first few weeks. In a nutshell, The initial treatment of Hopguard 2 resulted in a steady decrease in varroa populations for the first 2 to 3 weeks. Where the trial got a little weird was that a second treatment didn't continue the downward trend and in some cases the varroa numbers actually increased! I agree with his summary in that Hopguard 2 does kill mites and has a lot of promise but don't expect control in populous brood filled hives in late summer. I think, at best, it is a product that can be used with some surplus honey supers still on the hive to keep populations from exploding until you can follow up with something like OA (if broodless), thymol or MAQS (if temps are right) or Apivar. Spring use is another matter entirely and may well be what Hopguard 2 is best suited for. 
One warning, the saturated strips do tend to kill a few bees that get coated when inserting the strips and that would include a queen.


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