Mite Away Quick Strips

During my last hive inspection I took a photo of a Queen bee and spotted a varroa mite on a worker bee in the the shot. The chances of that happening are pretty slim, I'd actually taken a burst of images so I could choose the best one and the mite was only visible in one shot.

Varroa Destructor on a worker bee

As a result I decided to treat the hives for mites. There's a few different treatments beekeepers can use depending on what's happening in the hive. In the winter when there's no sealed brood in the hive a drizzling of oxalic acid solution is applied directly to the bees which does more harm to the mites, however if there's sealed brood in the hive then any mites in the brood are protected from the acid so it wouldn't be any use in August -unless the bees were broodless perhaps. During colony build up or after the honey has been removed I've used Api-Life Var before which is a bar impregnated with thyme oil, menthol and a few other things to treat varroa but at the moment I've still got supers on the hives so that rules that option out. This time I'll be going with a fairly new (to the UK) treatment based on strips of fondant and formic acid in a paper wrapper which acts as a wick. The product comes from Germany and they've called it the Mite Away Quick Strip or MAQS. Unlike other treatments it can be applied whilst supers are on the hives and treatment takes only 7 days unlike API-Life Var which needs repeating. Also this treatment is reported to penetrate brood cappings affecting mites are sealed within developing brood. Sounds pretty good and some may be thinking it could replace all the other mite treatments, however there is a popular school of thought that suggests using a range of treatments on the mites is wise to reduce the chances of mites developing resistance to the same treatments applied repeatedly which I'm inclined to go along with.

MAQS Beehive Strips

You can buy them in packs to treat two or ten hives. I have three hives but two small packs cost not much less than ten so I bought a large pack. They're supplied in a white bucket which I notice is a food grade plastic so I guess a lot of beekeepers will be repurposing them as honey buckets once empty.

Don't breathe in

Inside the bucket the strips are paired and sealed in plastic. A ten dose bucket contains 20 strips as you use 2 per dose. Even though they're in plastic wrappers the bucket is full of formic acid vapour and it's like taking a huge hit of smelling salt when you get that lid off, so I'd suggest not opening it indoors (..like I did) and trying not to breathe in.

Pictures!

The instructions for use are printed on the box in pictures. Basically you apply two strips on top of the brood box then if in use pop the queen excluder and super, or second brood box, or second brood box then queen excluder and super on top. The instructions look fairly idiot proof ..but the ingenuity of idiots is often underestimated. The instruction diagram show a hive with the frames aligned at 90 degrees to the hive entrance, this is called 'cold way' probably because of air coming in through the entrance. My hives are oriented with the frames parallel to the entrance or 'warm way' in beekeeping parlance. There's probably good arguments for warm way and cold way orientations but I've opted for warm way because of where I've located my hives and positioned the entrances, I also suspect that whilst it probably mattered more when people used solid wooden hive floors it's probably less important with the open mesh hive floors of today.

MAQS strips placed across the frames

My thinking is the strips need to placed across the frame tops regardless of the orientation of the entrance so vapour is being released into each seam, more so in the middle of the hive and each there is air flow around the strips to distribute the vapour through the hive. If the strips were placed along the frames you'd probably find a strong concentration of vapour under and above them and no or very little vapour reaching the centre of the hive.

Queen Excluder goes over the strips

Over seven days vapour from the evaporating strips fills the hive killing the mites -or 90% of them anyway. With this treatment ventilation is important to distribute the vapour so the manufacturer recommends leaving mesh floors open as opposed to closed with a sliding bottom board. Apparently a test with closed floors showed a 4-5% drop in efficacy. They also not that bees aren't keen on the stuff and it's common for treated colonies to be seen bearding (hanging out of the front of the hive in a mass). After seven days what's left of the strips can be removed and composted. There's some handling instructions for the strips. Basically wear gloves and don't get the stuff it on you. Whilst it does mean a distribution of formic acid throughout the hive the manufacturers point out this is something which occurs naturally in honey in concentrations of up to 2,000 ppm whereas in the hove air the formic acid concentration stays below 100 ppm so it should have no impact on the honey. Now to wait 7 days..

An August Inspection

Well the bees in Hive3 seems to be calming down a bit, they're still far from placid but today they didn't sting me once which is a huge improvement. The Queen is pretty elusive, I've not actually seen her since the day I marked her and with a splot of green paint on her back she should be hard to miss. However she's definitely laying eggs in there now.

Black Bees and Buckfast bees.
Spot the difference.

In the photo above of the bees on the top bars of Hive3 you can see some bees have one, two or three orangey brown bands on their abdomens. The sections of abdomen are actually called tergites and you can also see that some of the bees have only black tergites. Those are, believe it or not, the black bees. As time goes on the proportion of black bees in the hive should increase and as the Buckfasts reach the end of their short summer lifespan. Unfortunately I probably won't have a black bee colony for long because as soon as they raise a new Queen and she goes off to mate she'll mate with drones that re very unlikely to be the same race so it'll be mongrels from then on.

Hive1 had been queenless but I wasn't too worried as I'd spotted a huge Queen Cell in the middle of the comb so knew they were superseding her. During today's inspection I didn't see any eggs or young brood but I did spot her wandering about the comb. I suspect she's recently hatched and may not yet have mated, there's been some very rainy days recently so she may not've been able to make any mating flights so far. Because of that I decided against marking her just yet. Don't want a big blob of paint marking her out for birds after all. The hive was already very populous so despite being briefly queenless so they've been busy working the super. I'd actually given them a second super but they've barely touched that so far.

Plenty of capped brood in Hive2

Hive 2 is pretty full of brood ready to emerge and their Super is busy with already. I think when the current brood emerges they're going to need more space so I'll probably be adding another super very soon.

It's busy in the Super.

The Queen was happy to pose briefly for a picture. She's still the same Queen I found and marked in June and she's laying up the hive very nicely. Think I should've maybe been a bit quicker off the mark this year and made moves to replace the queens earlier rather than waiting for the bees to do it mid season.

The Queen of Hive2 going about her royal business

The more eagle eyed out there may spot something not so good in the above picture. I didn't see it at the time but when I was scaling it down to post on here I spotted a bee with a varroa mite on it's back.

Varroa Destructor on a worker bee, just above centre.

It's currently believed there's some level of varroa in every hive although some people will swear down their hives are mite free it's a little unlikely -unless you happen to be keeping bees in the Pitcairn Islands anyway. However you can't usually see them on the bees themselves unless there's a very heavy varroa load. The usual way to spot them is by putting a sticky board below the colony to catch any mites that fall through the mesh floor or to pull out some drone brood with a capping fork and check them for mites. I went through all the other photos I took today and couldn't see any more varroa but that's not too surprising really as they'll mostly be in with the sealed brood anyway.

Pulling out Drone Brood to check for Varroa

I've ordered some Mite Away Quick Strips (MAQS) today and when they arrive I'll be treating all three hives just to be safe.

Avenues Open Gardens, 2014

Every year a number of houses in The Avenues area of Hull fling open their gates and invite in all and sundry to peruse their gardens to raise money for a huge range of charities, this year it was Dove House Hospice. A charity providing community care for people with life limiting illnesses. You buy a map of the gardens and the money goes to the charity, some householders were also selling items ranging from plants to cakes through to books and bric a brak. This year the Avenues Open Gardens fell on Sunday the 6th and 13th of July 2014. There's a lot of gardens to see with some being open one of the days and others both. I previously blogged about it in 2012 but seem to have missed last years. This year with a friends small child in tow we only got round about a quarter of the gardens.

This tree sculpture is a tribute to St Cuthbert.
It was carved in 2006.

As well as nice big Victorian houses and fountains The Avenues has a number of adult trees. Unfortunately over the years some of these have died back. From 1999  number were turned into a collection of sculptures. Over the years their numbers have dropped as they've to decayed or been unexpectedly chopped down by the council and the last few are expected to be removed and sold off at some point.

Coleus

 There's usually a few interesting things to see in the various gardens. I can't recall what was in each garden at the moment but in the first was a rather impressive 18 year old bonsai tree, and a number of brightly coloured Coleus. One garden had a large hole with the legs of a mannequin sticking out from the shrubbery in it. I'd guess it was possibly a pond at some point but liked it's current jaunty crime scene look - which to be honest you just don't see that often.

Old beehive tucked away

It wasn't long before I spotted an old beehive at the side of a garden. It wasn't in use but the lady of the house used to keep bees in the past. I'm not entirely sure what type of hive it is with the lip on the edge of each box. It may be some variation of the William Burroughs Carr Hive with straight instead of sloping sides in which case these would be lifts that go on the outside of the boxes containing the bees, otherwise I suspect once propolised those boxes would be very difficult to separate.

This? It's called um.. Red Flower I think.

Some of the gardens had obviously had a lot of time spent on them by folk who evidently knew what they were doing and what they were planting. The striking red flowering plant above is probably a Crocosmia Lucifer, according to the picture recognition wonders of Google Image Search.

Flock of Metal Birds

The Mushrooms and the Ivy

It's often interesting to see what people use to decorate their gardens and the range included chimney pots, wooden pails, a couple of flocks of metal birds, various ceramics, a huge ancient flag, random bits of metal and wood ware and I'm pretty sure I saw a ships figurehead at one point.

Wildlife pond

There was an abundance of water features ranging from fountainy things and waterfalls to fish ponds and wildlife ponds. Some were tucked away whilst others were focal points. There's certainly a lot of frogs living in the Avenues' gardens.

This one? Pink Flower. Definitely Pink Flower.

I thought this shed was fantastic

There were some unusual constructions in stone, wood and metal including the shed/arbour/summerhouse combination above.

WBC Hive

There's another beekeeper in the avenues and I had a look at his apiary. He's still making hive boxes from reclaimed wood. He also makes his own wax foundation which he said saves him a lot of money. Wax foundation is basically a sheet of wax beekeepers give to bees to kick start the comb building and help control where they build it. Most small scale beekeepers buy it ready made and it needs replacing every few years. He mentioned that two of his five colonies were queenless at the time. One of mine was queenless at the time too so it was good to know that even with over thirty years experience it's not always avoidable. He showed me some wax queen cells he'd made from a wooden mold, basically 4 rounded dowels protruding from a base which are dipped in wax. They looked like bullet casings but apparenty the bees like them. I've used the Jenter system myself which consists of plastic cups and metal tubes to make artifical queen cells and I can imagine the ones made from wax are more readily accepted by the bees. I'm not sure how they work but I'd assume they can be stocked with an egg or grub by a beekeeper or the bees themselves may move a viable egg into the cup if they're in the mood.

Pokker

The last garden I looked at was home to a couple of recently arrived chickens. I'm not sure what breed they are, Barnvelders possibly, but they were very different to my Hybrids and Calder Ranger. Despite the size when I first looked at the run I actually missed them as their colouration was similar to the soil they were scratching in. One of them spotted my camera phone and posed long enough to get a headshot.

Big Black

Not an entry about Steve Albini's 80's noise metal band -although they're definitely worth a listen. This one's about a big black Queen.

The swarm I collected last month seem to be Black Bees (Apis mellifera mellifera) rather than Buckfast or descendants of Buckfasts. The rule of thumb way to recognise a black bee is, somewhat unsurprisingly, by it's colour -black or very dark brown. They do have browny orange fur but there should be no orangey brown sections of abdomen. There's also various measurements of body parts size, hair length etc to be taken into account if you want to be certain. There's a comprehensive article on how to identify black bees here.

I managed to locate the Queen and mark her with green paint (for 2014). She looks long and thin in comparison to the Queens in my other hives although part of that could be to do with having been slimmed down prior to swarming.

Black Queen with attendant worker, notice the black abdomen on both

You can see her slender abdomen shape

After I collected this swarm and along with another colony I'd made I found myself with 5 colonies which is realistically too many for my garden so I had to unite some colonies to get myself back down to three. I had to unite the swarm of black bees with Hive3 which contained the swarm I'd caught last year, I suspect they were probably Buckfasts originally. Black Bees have a reputation for not accepting other bees amongst their numbers and I can honestly say that at present this mixed race colony is seriously bad tempered. Whilst they were in the 6 frame nuc they were actually very placid but now they're sharing a hive with the Buckfasts the colony is very aggressive during inspections and I've had to walk away a few times already. On the first inspection after uniting them they put a good 6 stings into the wrist of my jacket within a few seconds of opening the hive. I had removed the Buckfast Queen from the other bees before uniting and I'm currently hoping that with time as the Buckfast workers die back they'll be replaced by Black Bees and the colony will revert to it's previously placid temprament. I united them on 3rd July and both sets of bee had eggs. With 3 weeks to emerge and a summer bee lifespan of 6 weeks I'm looking at early September by the time that happens. There was actually a break in egg laying after uniting to colonies but someone in there is laying a lot of eggs again so I'm hoping the original mated black Queen is still in there so I can see how they are to work with in comparison to my other colonies.