# when to medicate bees and how/when



## Michael Bush (Aug 2, 2002)

I can tell you what I've done or not done in the last 30 years of keeping bees:

Terramycin. Not for the last 28 years.

Fumidil. Never.

Menthol. Never.

Thymol. Never.

Grease patties, (with wintergreen NOT with Terramycin) used twice but not for the last four years. They are useful against the Tracheal mites.

FGMO, when I didn't have my bees on natural sized cells I fogged once every two weeks until fall and then I fogged every week. I did this one year (2003). The two years before I painted it on the top bars.

Checkmite. Never.

Apistan. For three years (out of 30 years) until it failed completely. All the mites around here are now resistant according to the state entomologist. Not for the last two and a half years.

Vaporized Oxalic acid. On some hives in the fall after brood rearing stops or in the spring before it really takes off. Useful if you are not on natural cell size. I've done this on some hives for the last two years.

Formic Acid. Never.

Essential oils (HBH and Wintergreen) two years out of 30 years. Not for the last 2 years. The HBH seemed to set of a lot of robbing. The wintergreen didn't hurt anything, but I couldn't see that it helped anything either.

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Summary. If you're not on natural cell size this is what I would do:

I would use FGMO fog ever other week and if mite counts warrent it, one oxalic acid treatment in the fall after brood rearing stopped. If mite counts go up too high in the middle of the year you could do a couple of Oxalic acid treatments to knock them down.

But in the meantime I'd start using 4.9mm foundation and eventually you can probably drop those two treatments.
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Others, of course, will have other opinions.


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## Antero (Jan 9, 2005)

BeeGirl

No matter what you use on varroa mites,the key is to monitor,monitor,monitor the mite drop using a sticky board.

Terry


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## BjornBee (Feb 7, 2003)

Beegirl,
Hopefully some useful information...

You need to ask yourself some questions.

Will I use chemicals in my hive? I personally use them on a "as need" basis. Nobody like chemicals, but they can be used safely. No farmer I know of is completely chemical free. Good judgement is needed. 25% were treated this year, and 75% had nothing in my own apiaries. And the three I have inspected so far are 38/41(no treatments-russians on SBB), 30/30(15 treated with apistan-and 15 no treatments), and 13/16(weak hives at my home, half treated with apistan) This being alive out of what was started winter with. Which leads to...

Look into and ask alot of questions about paying a little more for a good bee line. I can tell you that there is a BIG difference in bees, and the genetic lines available. Getting the run of the mill package that has the lowest price tag is a poor way to start.

Will I treat on a preventative basis? I do not think anyone should throw chemicals in hives as a preventative. Terramyacin is a waste until you have AFB, and that could be never. And to pre-treat only adds to AFB resistance. Chemical strips are being blown way out of reality. They are still effective in most area. And those highly concentrated areas with commercial operators only have themselve to blame. They have over used the strips, did not follow direction, and did not rotate chemicals, which is a part of any farming IPM program. This year every case of resistance to chemical strips that I found, were from using the same strips every year. I found one case of resistance to checkmite, and this was from a beekeeper who never used any strips at all.

Knowing how to do a simple pettis test, and actually doing it, will determine if you can, and which strip should be used. This of course is AFTER mite monitoring has determined it to be needed in the first place. (This being apistan or checkmite.) Those should be rotated every year and please look into a third option like OA or another option. Resistance would be non-existant on a three year rotation. Not using a particualr chemical would allow it to increase in effectiveness in time, and for those saying it failed years ago, it means nothing as to whether it would work today. A pettis test would answer the question, but some I suppose are promoting this claim years later in hopes of promoting thier own preference. If strips kill 99% of YOUR mites, thats what is important. And for many thats what they do.

Are you willing to have an "acceptable" loss of hives, or kill rate. This would be in hopes of strengthening your own bee genetics and to become a backyard queen producer. Even if it were just for yourself. It is fun, educational and many are having good results by selective breeding, and have not used chemicals for several years now.

There are beekeepers having good results with many ways of managing bees. Small cell, FGMO, and many others are options for you to try. The bottom line is that if your going to keep bees today, it involves more than throwing a package into a hive and waiting for the honey. Monitoring, testing, and really becoming the best beekeeper you can is the way to go. I would not rule out anything.

Your chemcal timing if you choose that approach should be based on "need". Not a particular time of the year. What chemical is used should be based on what is effective, with time and cost factored in.


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## Ian (Jan 16, 2003)

Get ahold of your local bee department. And they will till you the recomended rates and dosages of the products avaliable.

I would use oxtet, to get yourself going and familiar with your bees. It will protect you from outside infection, thats what I do. I use it both spring and fall in a icing sugar dust. But again your local ag department should have dosages and recomendations for you. 

And for varroa, I would only treat on a have to basis, especially only having a few hives. I use to advise to treat anyway, becasue the pest is there anyway, but really you must know what is going on in your hives and beable to determine wheather the treatmetn is working for you. That is really important. 

Right now I treat with fluvalinate in the spring, with a complimentary treatment of formic last year. What I do is test my "yards" for treatmetn. Scrape a few bees in a jar from five hives per yard, alchohol test, and treat the neccisary yards. I follow up to find effectivness. It is more accurate method used before heavey brooding.


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## mwjohnson (Nov 19, 2004)

Hello. Mr BjornBee could you tell me how to administer a pettis test, I haven't heard of this before. Thank you.
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Mark W. Johnson


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## Bob Russell (Sep 9, 2003)

Mark
Just offering some help here.If you would like to see the full article on this I suggest emailing the ABJ Editor and request the full script of the two articles.The originals were published:

American Bee Journal July 1998 Volume 138 No.7 Pages 535-541 inclusive.

Address email to Editorial staff

[email protected]

You could also search under google on the net and you should find the test procedure there also.


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## Antero (Jan 9, 2005)

If you go to Google and search "Apiculture Factsheet #224" it will take you to a link for Ministry of Agriculture page on Pettis Test.

Terry


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## BjornBee (Feb 7, 2003)

I finally found my notes and have a minute...

You will need the following.

**Two quart canning jars.

**#8 wire mesh, cut to fit the rim part of the rim/lid top.

**two index cards (75x125mm) This you will staple a one half inch to one inch section of apistan to one(centered), and checkmite to the other card.

**1/4 cup measure to scoop the bees

**Sheet of wite paper.

**4 small sticks or pencils

Step #1...Place treatment cards in the jars facing med strip inwards. Apistan card in one and the checkmite in the other.

Step #2...Shake bees from a brood frame into your lid or other pan, scoop 1/4 cup of bees into each jar and put the lid on. *do not shake the queen.

Step #3...Place the jars upside down on two sticks over the white paper. Place in the shade and wait 5-8 hours, or next morning if you do it late in the day.

Step #4...After the time period, count the mites that have fallen onto the peper. You will have one number for apistan, and one for checkmite.

Step #5...Add powdered sugar to the bees and do a sugar shake onto a clean piece of paper. Count those mites.

Step #6. Divide the mites killed by the strips by the number of mites killed by adding the two mite totals (strip and sugar shake) together. this will give you a percentage of mites killed by the strips. Make sure to keep both apistan numbers seperate from the checkmite numbers.

Notes. You will have one percentage number better than the other. Use the strip for your treatments that had the better kill by the strips and had the lowest number of mites knocked down by the sugar shake.
Remember..Heat kills mites. Make sure the jar is placed in the shade or cool room(step 3). You want a true number of mites that were killed by coming in contact with the strips, not killed by the sun and heat.

Pick the colony that has shown the greatest number of mites in each apiary by doing a sugar test. No sense in doing a pettis test on a hive that has better numbers than your weakest hive.

Do not be surprised if the chemical strip you have used in previous years has bad numbers. This is why you perform this test. To make sure the option you use is the most effective. A typical good ratio will be from 5 to 10 mites killed by the strips, for every mite you shake out afterwards with the sugar roll. If you have more mites being counted by the sugar test than originally killed by the strips, you have problems with that type strip. Hopefully its not with both.

It does stink that you have to buy a pack of ten strips prior to knowing which will work. It would be so nice if you could buy one strip and cut the pieces from that. (Make sure you use fresh, new, bought strips. Do not use strips from last year that have been sitting around.) Suppliers selling a "test" package would also be option, but i guess they know they make more if they sell them by the box. To bad the manufacturers can't realize the help they would be doing to the beekeeping industry, by helping beekeepers determine which one would be more effective, and help combat the resistance problem, and thus helping to perpetuate the product they produce.

In the meantime, a club would be a good way to offset the initial cost by buying and making the test cards as a group. Its less than 60 dollars for a ten pack of each (apistan and checkmite), but its hard to spend that type money for one or two hives. But its still less than a new package.

And wouldn't everyone in a particualr area, county, or club be better off if they knew thier fellow beekeepers and neighbors did not have resistant mites? I wish more would promote this to groups and help the old-timers who may be doing the same stuff of years past, and hurting everyone in the process. 

Yes, not using strips would be good in a perfect world. But many still do, and many always will as long as its on the market. And for many they are still effective for mite control. I am just trying to help who do use the chemicals, to do it corrcetly.


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## mwjohnson (Nov 19, 2004)

Thank you,Bob,Antero,BjornBee.
I guess I had heard of this test,but didn't recall the name.








I lost a nice (my best) hive a little while back,this hive was dropping HUNDREDS of mites in late summer,so I treated with Checkmite.Sure wish the guy I bought it from had mentioned a pettis test.
Think I'm gonna try using Succrocide this year,but heard that NYState beeks with over 500 colonies had approval to use Formic Acid (which counts me out),with possible approval for everyone else by fall 2005,still not sure what I want to do,besides getting those treated combs outta here.
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Mark W. Johnson


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## Jack Grimshaw (Feb 10, 2001)

Beegirl,
I think most people on this site advocate an IPM(Integrated Pest Management) approach to hive meds.Only as a last resort will they treat with chemicals.
First you have to know your enemy.What are you trying to control?Do you have a problem that needs control?Learn about bee pests and diseases that are common in your area.
Cultural controls can eliminate or postpone the need for meds,but what seems to work for some,may not work for all or may be too much work for you.
Bee genetics is advancing at a rapid pace.we now have SMR,hygenic,NWC,Russians,feral survivors to name a few.Most will agree that this is the future of beekeeping.
Widespread prophylactic use of meds has caused many of our present day problems of resistance.There is a better way.But it takes work.Are you willing? Jack


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## Michael Bush (Aug 2, 2002)

I think the first thing to do is learn to monitor the Varroa. They are your primary enemy. Screened Bottom Boards are helpful in this regard, but you can also buy a sticky board from most bee supliers that can also work. If you measure natural mite drop, which is the mites falling without any treatment, it can give you a good idea of what the population of mites is in the hive and you can decide what you want to do about them. There are a lot of alternatives. Many are discussed regularly on this board. If you search the web on Varroa you will find many pages of infomration about how they reproduce and if you search this board you will find much about what you can do about it.


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## Michael Bush (Aug 2, 2002)

>When to medicate bees and how?

Bjorn has chastised me for not doing this question justice. But to do it justice is a lot of material for me to write and you to absorb. But here goes:

Pests, Diseases and Treatments:

Wax moths. Galleria mellonella (greater) and Achroia grisella (lesser) wax moths are really opportunists. They take advantage of a weak hive and live on pollen, honey and burrow through the wax. They leave a trail of webs and feces. Sometimes the are hard to spot because they try to hide from the bees. They burrow down the mid rib (mostly in the brood chamber but sometimes in the supers) and they burrow in the grooves in the frames. Certan is the spores of Bacillus thuringiensis and can be put on the combs to kill the larvae of the wax moth. It is safe for bees and humans. I buy it from www.beeworks.com . Freezing combs will also kill the wax moth. The wax moths will also devastate empty comb that you are storing off of the hive. The only other controls are chemical ones. Some believe that using bacteria in the hive will upset the natural balance in the hive and wonÂ’t use it.

Nosema. Caused by a protozoan called Nosema apis. Nosema is present all the times and is really an opportunistic disease. The common chemical solution (which I donÂ’t use) is Fumidil. It is usually fed in the fall when bulking up for overwintering. The best prevention is to make sure your hive is healthy and not stressed and feed honey. Research has shown that feeding honey, especially dark honey, for winter feed decreases the incidence of Nosema. Any kind of stress and feeding sugar syrup increases the incidence. By all means, feed sugar syrup if you donÂ’t have honey and it means helping a struggling package or nuc or split. By all means, if you donÂ’t have honey, feed sugar syrup in the fall rather than let them starve, but if you can try to leave honey on for their winter stores. Symptoms are a swollen white gut (if you disassemble a bee) and dysentery. DonÂ’t rely simply on dysentery. Sometimes bees get into rotting fruit or other things that give them dysentery but it may not be Nosema. The only accurate diagnosis is to find the Nosema protozoa under a microscope.

Chalkbrood. This is caused by a fungus Ascosphaera apis. The main cause is too much moisture in the hive. Add some ventilation. See the section on ventilation for more information. If you find white pellets in front of the hive that kind of look like small corn kernels, you probably have chalkbrood. Putting the hive in full sun and adding more ventilation usually clears this up.

European Foulbrood (EFB). Caused by a bacteria. It used to be called Streptococcus pluton but has now been renamed Melissococcus pluton. European Foul Brood is a brood disease. With EFB the larvae turn brown and their trachea is even darker brown. DonÂ’t confuse this with larvae being fed dark honey. ItÂ’s not just the food that is brown. Look for the trachea. When itÂ’s worse, the brood will be dead and maybe black and maybe sunk cappings, but usually the brood dies before they are capped. The cappings in the brood nest will be scattered, not solid, because they have been removing the dead larvae. To differentiate this from AFB use a stick and poke a diseased larvae and pull it out. The AFB will Â“stringÂ” two or three inches. This is stress related and removing the stress is best. You could also, as in any brood disease, break the brood cycle by caging the queen or even removing her altogether and let them raise a new one. By the time he new one has hatched, mated and started laying all of the old brood will have emerged or died. If you want to use chemicals, it can be treated with Terramycin. Streptomycin is actually more effective but I donÂ’t think it is approved.

American Foulbrood (AFB). Caused by a spore forming bacteria. It used to be called Bacillus larvae but has recently been renamed Paenibacillus larvae. With American Foul Brood the larvae usually dies after it is capped, but it looks sick before. The brood pattern will be spotty. Cappings will be sunken and sometimes pierced. Recently dead larvae will string when poked with a matchstick. The smell is rotten and distinctive. Older dead larvae turn to a scale that the bees cannot remove. This is also a stress disease. In some states you are required to burn the hive and bees and all. In some states you are required to shake the bees off into new equipment and burn the old equipment. In some states they will make you remove all the combs and bees, and they will fumigate the equipment in a large tank. Some states just require you to use Terramycin to treat them. Some states if you are treating they will let you continue but if the bee inspector finds it they make you destroy the hives. Many beekeepers treat with Terramycin (sometimes abbreviated TM) for prevention. This is usually done in th early spring. A month before the supers go on is appropriate. The problem with this is that it can mask the AFB. The spores of AFB will, for all practical purposes, live forever, so any contaminated equipment will remain so unless fumigated or scorched. Boiling will not kill it. TM will not kill the spores, only the live bacteria. AFB spores are present in ALL beehives. (Yes Jim Fischer will disagree and Bjorn will probably agree) When a hive is under stress is the most likely time for an outbreak. Prevention is best. Try not to let hives get robbed out or run out of stores. Steal stores and bees to shore up weak hives so they donÂ’t get stressed and requeen weak hives. What you are allowed to do if you get AFB varies by state, be sure to obey the laws in your state. Personally, I have never had AFB. I have not treated with TM for the last 28 years. If I had a outbreak I would have to decide what I would do. It may depend on how many hives are affected what I might do, but if I had a small outbreak I would probably shake the bees out into new equipment and burn the old equipment. If I had a large outbreak, I might try breaking the brood cycle and swapping out infected combs. IMO if we as beekeepers keep killing all bees with AFB we will not breed AFB resistant bees. If we as beekeepers keep using Terramycin as a preventative we will continue to spread TM resistant AFB.

Parafoulbrood. This is caused by Bacillus para-alvei and possibly combinations of other microorganisms and has symptoms similar to EFB. The easiest solution is a break in brood rearing. Cage the queen or remove her and wait for them to raise one. If you put the old queen in a nuc or the old queens in a queen bank, you can reintroduce them if they fail to raise a queen.

Sacbrood. Caused by a virus usually called SBV (SacBrood Virus). Symptoms are the spotty brood patterns as other brood diseases but the larvae are in a sack with their heads raised. As in any brood disease, breaking the brood cycle may help. It usually goes away in late spring. Requeening sometimes helps also.

Breaking the Brood cycle. For all of the brood diseases this is helpful. To do this you simply have to put the hive in a position that there is no longer any brood. Especially no open brood. If you are planning to requeen anyway, just kill the old queen and wait a week and then destroy any queen cells. DonÂ’t go three or they will have raised a new queen. Wait another two weeks and then introduce a new queen (order the appropriate amount ahead of time). If you want to raise your own, just remove the old queen (put her in a cage or put her in a nuc somewhere in case they fail to raise a new one) and let them raise a queen. By the time the new queen is laying there will be no more brood. A hairclip catcher works for a cage. The attendant bees can get in and out and the queen cannot.

Small Cell and Brood Diseases. Small cell beekeepers have reported it helping with brood diseases. Especially once the size is down below 4.9mm.

Varroa Mites. Varroa mites (Varroa destructor previously called Varroa jacobsoni which is a different variety of the mite that is in Malaysia and Indonesia http://www.nhm.ac.uk/hosted_sites/acarology/saas/saasp/pdf10/saasp05b.pdf are a recent invader of beehives in North America. They are like ticks. They attach to the bees and suck the hemolymph from the adult bees and then get into cells before they are capped and reproduce there during the capped stage of the larvae development. The adult female enters the cell 1 or 2 days before it is capped. Being attracted by pheromones given off by the larvae just before capping takes place. The female feeds on the larvae for a while and then starts laying an egg about every 30 hours. The first is a male (haploid) and the rest are females (diploid). In an enlarged cell (see cell size section) the female may lay up to 7 eggs and since any immature mites will not survive when the bee emerges, from one to two new female mites will probably survive. These will mate, before the bee emerges and emerge with the host bee. Varroa mites are large enough you can see them. They are like a freckle on a bee. They are purplish brown in color and oval shaped. If you look at one closely or with a magnifying glass you can usually see the short legs on it. To monitor Varroa infestations you need a Screened Bottom Board (SBB) and a white piece of cardboard. If you donÂ’t have a SBB then you need a sticky board. You can buy these or make one with a piece of #8 hardware cloth on a piece of sticky paper. The kind you use to line drawers will work. Put the board under it and wait 24 hours and count the mites. ItÂ’s better to do this over several days and average the numbers, but if you have a few mites (0 to 20) you arenÂ’t in too bad of shape if you have a lot (50 or more) in 24 hours you need to do something.

Several chemical methods are available. Apistan (Fluvalinate) and Checkmite (Coumaphos) are the most commonly used acaracides to kill the mites. Both build up in the wax and both cause problems for the bees and contaminate the hive. 
"There is some evidence that AFB and varroa can actually reduce the effectiveness of the bee's immune system thus increasing their virulence. Incidentally, there is also some evidence that some of the varroacides we use can also do the same." http://www.beedata.com/data2/pam_foul_brood.html 

I donÂ’t use them.

Softer chemicals used to control the mites are Thymol, Oxalic acid, Formic acid and Acetic acid. The organic acids already naturally occur in the honey and so are not considered contaminates by some. Thymol is that smell in Listerine and although it occurs in Thyme honey, it doesnÂ’t occur otherwise in honey. Dr. Rodriguez has recently started adding this to the FGMO. I have used the Oxalic acid and liked it for interim control while regressing to small cell. I used a simple evaporator that Dennis Murrel had on his web site.

http://bwrangler.litarium.com/oxalic-acid-vaporizer/ 

Inert chemicals for Varroa mites.

FGMO is the most popular of these. Dr. Pedro Rodriguez has been a proponent and researcher on this. His original system was cotton cords with FGMO, beeswax and honey in an emulsion. The object was to keep the FGMO on the bees for a long period of time so the mites either get groomed or they suffocate on the oil. Later using a propane insect fogger was used to supplement the cords in this control system. The other up side of the FGMO fog was it killed the tracheal mites also.

http://www.beesource.com/pov/rodriguez/index.htm 

Inert dust. The most common inert dust used is powdered sugar. The kind you buy in the grocery store. It is dusted on the bees to dislodge the mites. According to the University Of Nebraska research, this method is not very effective unless you remove the bees from the hive and dust them and then return them. It is also very temperature sensitive. Too cold and the mites donÂ’t fall. Too hot and the bees die.

Here is a method where the bees are not removed from the hive:

http://bwrangler.litarium.com/varroa-blaster/ 

Physical methods.

Some methods are just hive parts or other things. Someone observed that there were less mites on hives with pollen traps and figured maybe the mites fell in the trap. The results were a screened bottom board (usually abbreviated SBB). This is a bottom board on the hive that has a hole covering most of the bottom covered with #7 or #8 hardware cloth. This allows the mites that get groomed off to fall down where they canÂ’t get back on the bees. Research shows that this eliminates 30% of the mites.

What I recommend.

I use the small cell and Screened Bottom Boards (SBB) and I monitor the mites with a white board under the SBB. As long as the mites stay under control, and they usually do, thatÂ’s all I do. If the mites were to start going up while the supers are on I would fog with FGMO. If they are still high after fall harvest, I would use Oxalic Acid. Probably some FGMO fog would be a good idea anyway just to make sure the tracheal mites are gone, but the small cell will usually control both mites and cause less general stress which causes most of the other diseases. Basically just small cell is effective for both kinds of mites and adequate under normal conditions.

Without getting into the issue of what methods are best, I think itÂ’s significant to the success and sometimes subsequent failure of many of the methods we, as beekeepers are trying to use. I used FGMO fog only for two years and when I killed all of the mites with Oxalic acid at the end of that two years there was a total mite load of an average of about 200 mites per hive. This is a very low mite count. But some people have observed a sudden increase to thousands and thousands of mites in a short time. I believe the issue is that the FGMO (and many other systems as well) manage to create a stable population of mites within the hive. In other words the mites emerging is balanced out by the mites dying. This is the object of many methods. SMR queens are queens that reduce the mitesÂ’ ability to reproduce. But even if you get to a stable reproduction of mites, this does not preclude thousands of hitchhikers coming in. Using powdered sugar, small cell, FGMO or whatever that gives an edge to the bees by dislodging a proportion of the mites, or preventing the reproduction of mites and seems to work under some conditions. I believe these conditions are where there are not a significant number of mites coming into the hive from other sources.

All of these methods seem to fail sometimes when there is a sudden increase in mites in the fall.

Then there are other methods that are more brute force. In other words they kill virtually all the mites. Even these seem to fail sometimes. We have assumed itÂ’s because of resistance, and perhaps this is a contributing factor. But what if sometimes itÂ’s again because of this huge influx of mites from outside the hive? Granted having the poison in the hive over a period of time when this explosion of population occurs seems to be helpful, it still sometimes fails.

I have not had this happen on small cell... yet. Nor have I had it happen on FGMO. I have seen it happen when I was using Apistan. But others have observed it with FGMO and I have to wonder how much this affects the success of many methods from Sucracide to SMR queens, from FGMO to Small Cell. It seems like there are at least two components to success. The first is to create a stable system so that the mite population is not increasing within the hive. The second is to find a way to monitor and recover from that occasional sudden influx of mites.of conditions that cause the mites to skyrocket seem to be in the fall when the hives rob out other hives crashing from mites and bring home a lot of hitchhikers.

Tracheal Mites
Tracheal mites (Acarapis woodi) are too small to see with the naked eye. If you want to check for them you need a microscope. Not a really powerful one, but you still need one. YouÂ’re not looking to see the details of a cell, just a creature that is quite small. Tracheal mites reproduce in young bees 1 to 2 days old. A common control for them is a grease patty (sugar and cooking grease mixed to make a patty) because it masks the smell that the tracheal mites use to find a young bee. If they canÂ’t find young bees they canÂ’t reproduce. Menthol is commonly used to kill the Tracheal mites. FGMO and (by some accounts) Oxalic acid will also kill them. Breeding for resistance and small cell are also useful. The theory on the small cell helping is that the spiracles (the openings into the trachea) that the bees breathe through are smaller and the mites canÂ’t get in. More research is needed on this subject. But basically, I just use small cell and they donÂ’t seem to be a problem.

Small Hive Beetles
Another recent pest that has not made it to where I am yet, is the Small Hive Beetle (Aethina tumida Murray). Sometimes abbreviated SHB. The damage they do is similar to the wax moths but more extensive and they are harder to control. If you smell fermentation in the hive and find masses of crawling, spiky looking larvae in combs you may have SHB. The only chemical controls approved for use are traps made with CheckMite and ground drenches to kill the pupae, which pupate in the ground outside the hive.

I have not had to deal with these, but I will probably go to more PermaComb (solid plastic fully drawn comb) in the brood nests if they become too much of a problem. Strong hives seem to be the best protection according to those who have delt with them.


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## TwT (Aug 5, 2004)

Dang Bjorn,after that chastising to MB, he done wore out them fingers


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## Grant (Jun 12, 2004)

Even from those of us who didn't ask for all this info...thank you, MB. 

gfcg731


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## Robert Brenchley (Apr 23, 2000)

I've never used Apistan, Bayvarol or Checkmite (the latter isn't available in the UK) and hope never to do so. When I started beekeeping I used Apiguard (basically Thymol) religiously once a year, I now monitor my mite drops, and use when needed. I didn't use any last year, but have one hive which is likely to need treatment this spring. 

I have my bees on open mesh floors (screen bottom boards in the States), which reduces winter humidity, and reduces chalkbrood, which is always present at low levels in my strain, and gets rid of a few mites. I have trays sitting under them full-time, so I only need to wipe them off and come back after a few days to get a mitefall count. This needs monitoring over time, and if a hive's count starts increasing out of control, it needs treatment. They will fluctuate at times; a hive will kill varroa, the drop increases, then it falls off again. They cope better on smaller cells, and apart from that the key appears to be genetic. 

Apart from that, I ignore low levels of chalkbrood, as native British bees are known for susceptibility, and I've never seen more than a few cells affected. I once had to treat for an outbreak of greater wax moth, which isn't native this far north, though it is spreading in this direction. I probably introduced these myself, in some nucs. I used Certan for that, and haven't seen them since, though I always have a few lesser wax moth, which overwinter here.

I've never had foulbrood, though I had a shock shortly after getting my first hive. It was a strain with a habit of overbrooding in spring, which regularly led to starved brood. About three weeks after getting my fist nuc, I saw a load of dead brood, and panicked! They soon got over it though as the hive expanded, and exactly the same thing happened the following year.


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## Dave W (Aug 3, 2002)

Thank you, MrBEE,

and Thank you, Mr. BjornBee


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## GreenMountainRose (Sep 6, 2004)

This page has a nice table for those of us who like to see things spatially:


http://www.westsoundbees.org/beekeeping_articles.htm


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## Michael Bush (Aug 2, 2002)

Great chart!


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