Dear all

I am sharing the last update that we made in this treatment against Varroa
spp. For Your Information.

We are using carboard strips soaked with a solution of oxalic acid into
glycerol.
Mr. Ricardo Prieto, Queen bees breeder from Junin (Buenos Aires province,
Argentina), is maintaining 400 beehives with less than 1% of varroa with
these strips since June 2014 up to now. Ricardo, Juan Manuel (his son) and I
we share enough information last saturday with some friends in Ricardo's
farm.

The following is an abstract that published in TECA exchange group answering 
to a
colleague

Preparation
Heat 1 kg of glycerol (food grade) up to 65ºC add 600 g of Oxalic acid
dihydrate stirring it.
The temperature will fall to near 35ºC then you need to maintain heating and
stirring up to the mixture become crystalline around 55ºC-58ºC

Soak the strips in this product when it is tepid, not warm, for about one
day and a half. Cardboard strips of 1,5 mm thick 30 mm wide and 350 mm long
will get around 19 g of the product each.

Then allow strips to drain for a day or less until they are not wet before
it use.

As you can see I am talking about a "product" not only a solution.

We are trying to check what is it happening. I found that with this method
we can distilled formic acid and
the product that is intermediate is glyceryl mono oxalate.
It seems that the main product that we produce is this glyceryl mono
oxalate.
We are trying to find a lab to check it. If you can help please contact me.

We talk about to register these strips but we are beekeepers we are not
lawyers.
 We think that we can spray this method as State of the Art. We published it
in "Espacio Apicola" No. 109 (June 2014) ISSN 1850-0757

The treatment

It seems also that it work by contact.
The bees begin to gnaw the strips until they are removed from the hive.
Then if population and brood is too high the bees will removed the strips in
less than two month.

With more than 10% of infestation according the size of the swarm we put
from 6 to 8 strips per brood chamber and we found excellent results in a
week.
I don't know about you but in our area we catch some swarms in spring some
times from migrations of abandoned colonies. Especially these last ones with
high percentage of varroa.

Now next to the winter we have 3 strips into the brood chamber. During the
expansion of the brood nest we suggest to use 5 strips per brood chamber.
Then if population and brood is high the strips will be removed from the
beehive before two month. You need to maintain 5 new strips into the colony
after the final of the crop. Later when population decreased we are
maintaining 3 strips, it seems to be enough. You need to make your own
experience.

best regards
Fernando
Córdoba - Argentina

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