> Were you monitoring the mites, saw they occurred at high levels, but decided to "wait and see" and did not treat?
Right. I saw the levels go up, but my plan was to treat after the supers came off. By then the levels were too high and the hives were collapsing. Some collapsed in fall, some failed to over winter, some made it but now they won't build up.
I was basically trying to follow an IPM model. I used the drone brood trapping method to prevent build up of mites, and then monitored. After the threshold was reached, I treated with Apilife Var. I was hoping it would work, and I would have a better story to tell.
Of course, the mites are not the whole problem. But once they go past a certain point, there isn't anything to be done. The people I know whose bees look good now treated midsummer with fornic.
I know what you are thinking, there may be other pathogens involved. And there may be. But it's moot since I have no intention of applying any treatments now. My plan this year is to requeen with mite resistant stock, and observe. I try to use one plan and see what the effect is. If you have various plans, then you can't tease out the effect.
I am not trying to maximize the bees, but rather, trying to find the minimum amount of intervention. Obviously, I went below the minimum. It's not that I don't know what to do, it's that I am experimenting.
When I worked at the Dyce Lab I studied the mite syndrome for many years. I concluded then that the treatment had to be done in midsummer, or the hives would crash. At the time, no one had figured out a good way to do it. I suggested this to Prf. C, but he said it was impossible to treat because the supers were on.
Then the 24 hour formic treatment was developed. We could have been the ones to come up with it, but whatever. Then as a bee inspector I saw over and over again, bees that were untreated or treated too late failed.
The only thing that seems to work reliably is to buy new bees. They seem to do great the first and second year. The third year they go downhill and croak.
I wrote a series of articles in the ABJ called "Keeping Bees Without Chemicals". In it, there were recommendations, success stories, etc. Problem is, it never worked for me. But the fact that others have succeeded at it prods me to experiment. Not for any moral objection, but for aesthetic reasons. I find the application of pesticides to hives to be distasteful.
I hear of commercial beekeepers that apply various treatments every month or so during the season. Some of these guys simply treat with everything all the time. It makes me shudder. Not because of the danger to the honey so much as that isn't the sort of beekeeping that attracts me. I may be stuck in the 1980s.
PLB
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