Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
One unknown in all of this is the level of viruses in your colony. Whether mites carry
and transmit these viruses (they do for some) or simply enable them when they violate
a bee's system (they do that a lot) is less important than the fact that when you have
lots of varroa mites in a colony the incidence of virus symptoms in your bees is much
greater. Moreover, when you see varroa populations build and you enact some sort of
control—whether a solid IPM program, soft, or hard chemicals—the viruses don't in-
stantly go away because it can take from one to three months to purge the system of
these tiny demons. Viruses are transferred within colonies from bee to bee, from queen
to egg to bee, from bee to larvae—and they will continue to plague a colony long after
you have successfully reduced or eliminated the mite population.
I trust you can see now why it is far more beneficial to keep mites out of your colon-
ies in the first place rather than to have to clean up the mess later.
Here's a trick you can use to give you an idea if there are varroa present in your colony.
Hold the frame so that you are looking at an angle from the top of the frame toward
the bottom of the frame, so you see the bottom side of the cells. The white spots you see
here are the fecal deposits varroa leave when they are feeding on larvae in the cells.
The two hard chemicals used to treat varroa mites are impregnated in plastic strips and
hung between frames. Bees walk on the strips, and pick up a bit of poison that kills the
mites. The rust-colored strip (above, top) is an Apistan strip (above), the white strip is
CheckMite. Both are effective against mites not already resistant to these chemicals,
but resistance is a certainty, both become absorbed in beeswax, and both affect both
queen and drone health. These should be your last option in varroa management.
Treating Varroa Mites
