Hello Everyone,

Last fall I had lots of visible mites, small clusters and some crawlers.
The bees were actively removing infected brood and damaging the mites
themselves.

I had seen colonies on large cell comb collapse long before this stage.
Any survivors would have been on just a couple of frames and would have
been unable to generate enough heat to expand colony size this spring.

Lost about 40% of my small cell colonies throughout  the winter. Most
were lost to mite damage with about 10% lost to queen failure late in the
spring. Lost all of my Russian hives including the breeder. Lost 50%of my
SMR hives with open mated Harbo queens.

Most of the surviving hives came through the winter with 5 to 6 frames of
bees and a small patch of brood by March. Late winter has been very cold
with a cold, not so nice spring. It's been a cycle with three days of
spring then two to four days of cold winter since February until mid May.

Since then the hives have expanded rapidly. The best (Harbo) now fill two
deep supers and will need to be split! The average are a box and a half
of bees and brood. The worst are about 6 frames bees with some brood.

I have not seen a single varroa mite on a bee or on drone brood this
spring. They are still in the hives as the natural mite fall is about 2
mites/week/hive. Yes, that's per week per hive! Last fall some of these
hives were dropping hundreds of mites/day.

The surviving bees are healthy  with no DWV damaged bees, are raising
lots of drones and are expanding much faster than I have experienced
before especially considering the very cold, nasty spring weather we have
had.

Best Wishes
Dennis Murrell