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..

Enemy under the Microscope

I've previously posted about Varroa Destructor, the asian mite that poses a huge threat to european honeybees, this week I spotted a dead one on the plastic board that goes beneath the nucleus hive. At about 2mm across and flat like a little discus they take some searching to spot but every bee keeper needs to look out for these critters.

Tiny 2mm corpse

One aspect of beekeeping I've not really spent any time on yet is microscopy. There's various things one can do with a microscope such as identifying bee diseases and pollen grains, learning a bit about bee anatomy and artificial insemination of queens if you ever feel the inclination. I haven't got round to examining the stomach contents of squashed bees for bacteria or searching for tracheal mites but I may give it a whirl on a rainy day.

Anyway a couple of years ago and purely for aesthetic reasons I acquired an antique microscope and have never really felt the need to upgrade to one of those new fangled models made in the past hundred years or so. Actually it's probaby a replica really as those old microscopes didn't have the best quality glass lenses and this one seems pretty sharp when it's focused. Also if it'd been made back in the days of yore I suspect it would have a manufacturers name on it somewhere, optics manufacturers were keen on that sort of thing -afterall it pays to advertise. The only downside to this very easy to use antique/possibly mock antique gadget is that like pretty much everything else made before 1996 it lacks a USB port, does look pretty tho.

The cutting edge of microscopy,
circa 1870.

I popped the dead mite on a slide, flipped it onto it's back and stuck it under the microscope. To get a photo with it I held my cameraphone (which now an HTC Desire S if you were wondering) above the microscope and manouvered it till I could see into it on the phone screen.Sounds easy enough ..but it wasn't. The slightest movement or angle change on the phone meant losing the image entirely and letting the phone rest on the viewfinder meant pushing the viewfinder down and losing focus.

For your delectation here's what I saw..

Varroa Destructor under the lens

Not the prettiest thing you could find at the bottom of the garden.Well actually I've not seen what you keep in your garden but it's certainly not the prettiest thing in mine. The structures you can see are it's eight legs and I think the thing sticking up in the middle is actually it's mouthparts, they punch a hole in the bee and suck out the hemolymph. Since it's discovery in the Soviet Union and Japan in the sixties (thanks Wikipedia!) these critters have travelled all over the world affecting honeybee stocks everywhere warm enough to support them with the exceptions of Autralia who's bio screening measures seems to be working, part of Libya and the Pitcairn Islands -probably on account of there's nothing of any actual interest to anyone on them. You may be thinking hang on it's a tiny creature with little midget legs how far can they actually travel? Well they can go up to about 3 1/2 miles riding a bee but they've also managed to travel huge distances thanks to people. Yeah people moved them all around the world by shipping bees all over the place so basically it's a man made problem. Face palms all round! Weather permitting I'll be treating the nucleus for varroa this weekend.

The Destructors

Bees have problems. Probably the biggest one in the UK at present is the Varroa Destructor, an asian mite that lived amongst asian bees who were able to control the mite within their colonies. Mankind in his wisdom or lack thereof  has managed to transport the mites over much of the world to places where the honeybees have no defence against them. Our bees tend to ignore these rather large mites that cut whacking great big holes in their chitin and dine on their body fluids. Well actually they don't completely ignore them, they chew their own wings off if they get too bothered by them. Either way it's not good.

I wasn't able to get a picture of one using my camera phone and microscope so here's a link to a google image search for Varroa Destructor. As you can see they're rather large as mites go in comparison to their hosts, and look a little like crabs. For a comparison it's a bit like if you were being parasitised by medium sized cats.

There's a few ways to treat a honeybee colony for varroa and most people use a mix of measures. The most ubiquitous one is replacing bee hive floors with a wire mesh so any falling mites leave the hive. You can brush icing sugar into the hive which is supposed to loosen the mites' grip on the bees causing them to drop off. You  then put a monitoring tray below the hive and count the number of mites that fall. I tried this and saw exactly no mites at all. Either it didn't work or ants, wasps or whatever gobbled up the mites before I saw them. It did make the bees look amusing as they  buzzed round the garden covered in icing sugar like little angry ghosts. another way to check a colony for mites is to use a capping fork to pull out a load of drone larvae, the mites prefer the drone larvae, then you can count the mites on the larvae. I did this too and saw no mites either.

After the open mesh floor the next step is some kind of chemically type thing to kill the mites and not the bees. In different countries there's different substances you're legally allowed to use. I opt to use something called Apilife Var -it's a mix of thymol, Eucalyptus Oil, Menthol and Camphor. It certainly smells strongly and probably clears a blocked nose faster than Vicks. The theory is is suffocates the mites but doesn't harm the bees.

Apilife Var

It comes as two black biscuit type things in a yellow foil. You break the biscuits into 4 pieces and put them in the corners of the hive brood box. Whilst they're made from natural products the wrapper does say to avoid letting it make contact with human skin. Bees are actually livestock so whenever treated with a medicine such as Apilife Var the beekeeper has a legal obligation to keep a record of the batch number of the product.

Apilife Var in brood box

It seems to work rather well and I was soon seeing dead mites dropping onto the monitoring board beneath my strongly medicinal smelling hives. Whilst it may not harm the bees it seriously annoys them. To get the above picture of the broken biscuit in the hive corners I had to smoke the bees and photograph it quickly because it doesn't take long before the bees start attacking the stuff. They shred it and throw it out. Because of this you have to repeat it four times  on a weekly basis.

You can't get rid of the varroa from a colony completely so what beekeepers try to do is keep the varroa population at a level that doesn't impact the bees too heavily. There was an article on a BBC program this year about a chap who seems to be making headway in developing bees that will groom each other and pull off the mites -as the asian bees do, but it's probably going to be a long time before we have self grooming bees.