If a hive is badly infected with varroa how long does it take after effective mite treatment for viral disease levels to drop to normal?  The reason I ask this is because last summer I had some nucs with very high varroa levels in early June.  I treated with apivar and saw a fast knockdown of varroa.  But, I also continued to see more deformed wings and crawlers on the ground around the hives than I liked for at least six weeks after treatment.  I also saw bees dragging out young bees with mini abdomens for about the same period.  It seemed to me like at treatment time I had a mix of viral diseases well established and while I knocked the varroa down the viral load was so high it took quite some time for the viruses to run their course once varroa were gone.  By fall those nucs were looking good and were five over five deeps which wintered to the tune of 80% which seems fine to me.  Those nucs are coming on strong this spring in spite of the very late
 spring.  The first day they brought in any pollen was April 1. Three weeks later than normal.

Local wisdom is a large colony that produces a lot of honey all summer and gets stacked up pretty high which inhibits much treatment for varroa nearly always dies that winter.  They even die if varroa are well controlled in September.  This has never made sense to me unless the viral load in the treated hive is slow to die out leaving you with a hive going into winter with a lot of sick bees even if varroa counts are low.  If this idea has any merit it means you need to knock varroa levels down as far as possible in early spring in hopes of not getting too bad a build up in both varroa and viruses over the prime honey period here of June 1 to August 1 when the hives tend to be stacked rather high.  Then get that honey off early August and treat again.

Dick

" Any discovery made by the human mind can be explained in its essentials to the curious learner."  Professor Benjamin Schumacher talking about teaching quantum mechanics to non scientists.   "For every complex problem there is a solution which is simple, neat and wrong."  H. L. Mencken

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