BEE-L regulars may recall that I lost all my hives over winter last year.  I had about 100 colonies in summer 2010 after splitting.  I reduced that number down to about 75 good ones by the end of summer.  They looked great and took feed going into the fall.  By late fall, though, they began to collapse, and by spring all were dead.

As a result, I had lots of feed in brood comb this spring and wondered if I could safely put new bees on the comb without disinfecting and decided I could.  I bought 10 doubles, sold one and split the rest twice, getting 38 splits, which have now been reduced to 28 after I eliminated the poor and unsuccessful splits.  I had some problems with the cells used in my second split.

Anyhow, I have been away until now and came back to check on my hives.  They are by now mostly in 4 EPS boxes and quite full of honey.  (I don't extract).

Yesterday, I put six drop boards under the six hives I keep on screened bottoms, and just now I went out to count the Varroa.  

Guess what, I could not find even one dead varroa in the six hives.  I would have expected to see at least a few.

I know the man who sold me the hives had some varroa last year.  What is going on?  

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