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Date: | Sun, 25 Mar 2018 19:29:44 -0400 |
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>>> I used Apiguard and it did its job, but the lingering smell.....
> Oddly, that's not something that we notice.
I treated my hive with Thymovar for 5 weeks last Fall, and I found
the smell quite upsetting. Usually when I sit on the deck, a few
feet from the hive, I detect a wax/honey/propolis kind of scent
that's quite pleasant and comforting. With Thymovar in there, the
smell of the hive was just plain wrong! Yes, I know that this is
an emotional reaction more than anything, but I'm surprised that
the bees don't pack up and leave just to get away from that smell. :-/
I don't think the smell lingered, though. A couple of weeks after
the end of treatment, I took the hive down from two brood boxes to
one in preparation for overwintering, and ended up taking the extra
box indoors for a while in order to decide which old combs needed
to be rotated out. So that box of frames actually sat in my kitchen
for a significant time; I would have noticed a lingering thymol smell.
> Perhaps due to our different
> climate. I'm curious as to the mechanism of how the thymol got into your
> combs. Thymol evaporates very slowly. Since Apiguard is applied in a pan
> or on a card, the granules must be carried by the bees for removal from the
> hive. I'll see whether I can track its distribution this summer, using a
> fluorescent tracer.
If that smell from two Thymovar wafers is due to slow evaporation, I
shudder to think what fast evaporation would be like!
Anne, backyard beekeeper, Montreal.
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