Second,I want to share a website that Nancy Ruppert encouraged all to visit at the Aug. 2017 bee club meeting. About halfway down on the page you'll find a really great PDF called "TOOLS FOR VARROA MANAGEMENT" that breaks down the different types of treatments, formulations, effectiveness, considerations as well as advantages and disadvantages. There are also links in the article that show how to apply certain Varroa treatments.
https://honeybeehealthcoalition.org/varroa/#videos
Third, please use the Mite Patrol through the Guilford County Beekeepers. I took advantage of this earlier in the year and found that my mite counts were outside the "Safe" zone. I believe there are 4 teams that will go to your apiary and show how to perform a sugar shake and, if needed, an Oxalic Acid treatment. These guys are awesome and they do it free of charge.
Today, I applied a 1/2 treatment of MAQS (Mite Away Quick Strips) to two hives at my house. The levels were back up even after an OA treatment in July. I decided on MAQS since it is organic, easy to apply, and has an effective rate of killing the mites under the capped cell. I'll continue to use OA in the future, I'm just going to rotate my treatments as recommended by a number of resources. What's interesting is that within 15 minutes of applying the half strip (following the directions), I noticed the bees hauling off the brood. About 5 brood per minute were coming out of the hive and the bees were taking them way off somewhere. I figured they would just throw the infected brood off the landing board and let the yellow jackets have lunch, but no, these guys hauled them way off. I hope that I didn't wait too late to treat this year.
Here's a pic of two bees removing the brood almost immediately after applying the MAQS. They are indicated by the pen marks.
- Capture.JPG (42.93 KiB) Viewed 5061 times