> cslade wrote: "shook swarming is more effective against Varroa than against EFB!"

What I found last summer in the throes of my EFB episode was that EFB is the "all natural" cure for varroa. 

That's ironic considering the fact that my EFB was first deemed likely to be PMS, which appalled me. Only afterwards, I remembered that I had years of weekly mites counts and years of monthly sugar rolls on these hives which made an untreated/undetected mite overload very unlikely.  So I discarded the first diagnosis, and cut to the chase with lab testing. Alas what I thought was EFB, was EFB.

So I soldiered on doing various things to deal with it, including treating with antibiotics.  Most of the colonies got visibly better fairly quickly after the Oxytet. But as I continued my long habit of weekly monitoring, I began to think I had somehow lost the knack of reading the results. The mite counts on the sick colonies went low, and stayed low, as in non-detectible or less than 1% even by late summer and through the fall with no mite treatment.  

When you think about, it makes sense, however.  EFB is (mostly) a spring disease here.  The previous fall and winter I controlled the mites with my usual fairly assertive regimen, including the broodless OAV treatment in Dec. So the hives that had EFB already had a typically (for me) low mite level when they got sick with EFB. And then EFB screwed up their ability to get most brood to the capping stage for a further one to two months. Without maturing brood getting to the capped stage, the varroa would have had a spectacularly low reproductive success rate.  Which was perfectly mirrored in my monitoring results.  And the mite levels remain unusually low, even now a year later. If a brood break helps bend the mite curve on Randy's Handy Calculator, a sustained, months-long, brood dearth, takes it down off the edge of the page.

So for all of you out there longing for a cure for varroa - I'll sell you some skanky EFB-contaminated combs - cheap! 

BTW, I treated the sick colonies for mites (OAV) last fall and winter, anyway, when the "healthy" ones needed it, just like I treated the "healthy" ones with Oxytet because the EFB ones needed it. I take a whole-yard point of view.

I am feeling chipper-er about it all today, as all the EFB colonies which I have inspected closely so far (only three more to go through) are showing no signs of EFB this spring.  But I lost one of the affected ones late last summer (just never turned the corner like the others) and two more over the winter. (One was smaller, but the other was my strongest EFB-survivor. Go figure.)  

Nancy Wicker

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