Thanks Medhat,
Perfect. As you know we have a very small beekeeping community up here only 4 beekeepers with more than 10 hives and no more than 200 hives in the whole territory. We are just starting to form up a Bee Club here and I am looking for simple "natural" ways to get people to manage their mites. OAV is not for everyone and I will not lend out my tool to anyone I don't "trust" to be careful for their own health. The Hopguard II website was showing a lot of claims that I wanted to ensure had been proven via studies and had been tested in colder places.

Even our urban bee densities is very low by southern standards, so along with the long winter brood breaks, low hive densities, mite monitoring (using sticky boards), an available "natural" treatment from the bee club, with education on the dangers of bees getting infested via robbing due to weak mite infested local colonies. We should get a good handle on this potential problem. I have also started tracking and looking for the best windows to do splits successfully up here (reduce the requirement to bring outside bees in). The other focus for me is the use of single brood hive management approaches for better yields, easier inspections, more intuitive splits and better timing of them as our 1st flow here is mid June (2 weeks) followed by mid July (3-4 weeks). New beekeepers would run doubles for the 1st 1 or 2 years to build wax and learn the basics and then switch to single brood management. I am currently overwintering a couple of singles and a nuc to see how they do. They are setup with temperature and humidity sensors so I can monitor their progress. Our biggest beekeepers here overwinters more than half as singles with similar success rates.

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