I’m looking for veteran advice on a prospective plan for varroa control
next year.  Can you all offer any feedback?  Here’s the plan: as soon as
possible after the sourwood flow ends (the last major flow of the season
ending about mid-July) I trap each queen somehow to keep her from laying
new eggs.  16 days after trapping the queen I use some sort of form
board/vertical queen excluder to limit her to just one frame of drone
brood.  Nine days later that frame of drones should be getting capped and
there shouldn’t be any other capped brood in the hive, so I’m speculating
an extremely high percentage of varroa should enter that drone brood.  In
the meantime, say day 18, I could release the queen at large or kill the
old queen and complete my yearly requeening.  I will have lost 16-18 days
of brood rearing, but hives are reluctant to raise much brood during the
summer dearth anyway, and there’s still plenty of warm weather afterward to
raise up a young population for overwintering.  If I then eliminate that
drone brood will I actually get an outstanding varroa kill?  Is there a way
I can do this without inciting swarming?  For my scale the labor seems
manageable.  But what other challenges would this method present?  What
varroa control can be expected from a broodless period even without drone
brood trapping?  Thanks in advance for your advice and warnings.

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