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Date: | Sun, 10 Jul 2022 06:06:08 +0000 |
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I can understand local beekeepers frustration in not seeing any real action, but no doubt there is a lot going on in the background doing the delimiting survey.
I was involved in an isolated incident in 2002 (in NZ) when a log containing a feral hive was brought to a saw mill in my area. The feral hive was only there a week before being destroyed however this was long enough for mites to migrate.
A 5kl restricted zone was put around the area which included my hives. These were all the hives were treated and I was put on a standstill for three weeks where I couldn’t touch my bees.
I decided I would try to eliminate all the feral hives as I thought there wasn’t many.
I did a letter drop to all residents offering a pot of honey for each site found. This brought in about 7 sites.
I then started bee-line to get an idea of the density of ferals in the area. This is especially easy if the ferals are black bees and the managed hives have yellow bees.
I attracted bees by heating up cappings and used a freshly extracted frame to get the bees robbing and paint marked the visiting bees, recording the time they took to return and noted the direction they went.
I moved every 500 metres to triangulate the nest sites. Most areas had about four different nests.
I then went looking for these once they had really started flying and found most in very large old trees some only 100 metres apart. One in a church, an old rusty oil drum and one in a rock crevices but most were in 100 year old trees.
I sealed these in with expanding foam. Several I had to go back to as a few had multiple entrances.
For those I couldn’t find or wasn’t allows on the property I swapped the bait frame a few days later to one with sugar syrup and a tiny amount of insecticide and observed the flight activity.
It only took about an hour to kill the feral hives in each area.
As soon as the bees coming to my bait station changed to yellow bees (my bees we about 1 kl away), I took away my bait station and moved to another area. Initially I killed a few of my bees with poison (left the bait frame too long), saw dead bees outside one of my hives but the hive recovered. After that I squashing any of my bees that came to the bait station.
I found that an area I considered poor for honey production was full of feral hives. In the end It was easier to just walk down the road and look for flying bees.
I was doing this for about two weeks, however what I failed to do was follow-up the baiting a week later to make sure I had killed everything. I found out a few years later I had missed about three ferals but all this really slowed the spread of mites for a couple of years.
So start training the local beekeepers to bee-line. It’s fun and all for a good cause. In the Australian bush research has shown that there are approx 125 ferals hives per square mile. A lot less if the area suffered from the recent forest fires.
Local beekeepers should make entrance guards to seal their bees in for a day in those hives outside the zone when bee-lining ferals.
I believe that eliminating ferals is the key to controlling mites. They are going to die anyway in the next three years if varroa can’t be eliminated.
And yes I did make a few mistakes: fell off a fence trying to get at a feral, twisted my ankle jumping off another fence and as above killed about 30 of my bees. However during this time I picked up a feral swarm and put it in an apiary outside the restricted area. Realising my mistake, the next day I went back and put strips in all the hives. A mite from the swarm dropped on to a sticky board so I intensified the treatment using oxalic acid fumigation. I blasted all the hives for three weeks (every few days with oxalis acid fumigation -primus heated Canadian model) which killed any other mites as I never saw mites in these hives for years.
So it is possible to kill mites in hives when you don’t have drones flying.
All the best. It wasn’t possible to stop varroa in NZ but we have learnt a lot since then and there are far more products available now to use, the best one to detect mites being the formic acid flash treatment with mites falling on to a sticky board on the bottom board of the hive.
Frank Lindsay
Wellington NZ
Sent from my iPhone
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