Tag: MAQS

Posted on by

Oxalic Acid for Mite Control

This year we have started using oxalic acid in the spring instead of MAQS or mite away quick strips. Both oxalic acid and formic acid are present in honey and are organic acids so they are considered natural or organic miticide treatments.  Even so, they are quite harsh to work with.

Formic acid has a very strong smell.  It seems to be more potent than vinegar and more irritating.  It is very effective and tests by the MAQS manufacturer say that it will kill mites under cappings.  This is important.  Even so, we have found it to be hard on the bees and especially the queens.  It is hard to prove if they become physically damaged by my the miticide or if the prolonged exposure to the smelly acid causes the bees to think that her queen pheromone is not present, and deduce that she is failing or not actually alive anymore despite the fact that she is present.  Based on discussions we have had with other beekeepers this seems to be a problem that can happen, but it is not always a regular occurrence.   Weather and age of the queen probably play into this quite a bit as well.  We have also heard that formic acid is not as good as it used to be at killing mites.  These issues and reports are pushing us to try something new.

Oxalic acid has been used in Europe and Canada for many years.  There are two methods of application – vaporization and dribble.  Most beekeepers and scientists that study its effectiveness claim that it kills 90% or more of the mites present on the bees when the treatment is applied.  Even so it does not kill the mites under the cappings.  To do this, vaporization is commonly used to kill the mites within the open cells during periods of low or no brood rearing.  Otherwise the dribble method can be used for easy and quick application.  Randy Oliver has been studying oxalic acid recently and he does prefer the dribble method.

We applied oxalic acid to all of our colonies this spring.  The packages were vaporized with a few days of being installed in their hives.  We also treated all of our overwintered colonies three times approximately eight days apart to kill mites on the bees and in the cells that were open at the time.  Mite testing showed that at the beginning of June, our hives were mite free.  The test we used was the alcohol was test.  A sample of bees are taken, placed in the washing cup or device, rinsed with an alcohol solution, and then the mites that come off the bees are counted.  All of the samples came up zero mites!!!

We will be trying the three treatment vaporization method later in the season to see how it performs in the fall as well.

 

 

Posted on by

Queen Acceptance, Weather, and Food

This year it has rained at least once every week since spring started.  Most weeks it has been raining twice a week at a minimum.  Now summer is supposed to have taken over and it is still raining way too much. This is not only disconcerting for the beekeeper but it is very disconcerting for the bees.  Worse yet, we are starting to see the problems that this has caused and the errors of our ways.

As most beekeepers do, we purchased packaged bees and new equipment for replacing our dead outs and expanding our operation.  We hived the packages and began feeding sugar syrup and pollen patties.  Once the nectar flow was starting, or scheduled to start, we removed the feed from the hives and added honey supers. The rain kept coming every week.

When we checked on them the bees never seemed truly happy. And we noticed that the new packages queens had a poorer acceptance rate than we are used to seeing.  We gauge this on the number of queen cells produced by colonies started as packages.  Nearly all were building at least one queen cell.  Some had multiples.  This despite the fact they had a queen that was laying eggs and apparently operating normally.  Usually this behavior is only seen in a few new package colonies and usually if they do it at first, the behavior goes away as the season goes on and the nectar flow starts.  We made a few nice nucleus colonies with these cells, but after a while it becomes very disheartening to keep destroying large swarm and supercedure cells.

Then during our inspections, we started seeing problems with mites.  But the problems are much more advanced that we have seen before.  Normally at this time of the year we would only see one or two mites occasionally if at all, especially on a brand new hive, but this time we are seeing many more.  We can actually see mites on some of the bees in the new hives that were packages just a few weeks before.  If you can see the mites on bees, just imagine how many there are on the rest of the bees and how many there are living beneath the cappings.  We removed drone brood to find hordes of mites.  This was very alarming.

To prevent problems down the road we decided to be proactive and we reached for our weapon of choice, mite away quick strips or MAQS. We saw some mites drop, but not as much as we expected.  At this point we were hopeful that the mites in the cells had died.

The treatment seemed to exasperate the problems that we were seeing with queen acceptance and absconding.  Now where there were just a few cells we saw six. Where there were six we saw a dozen. We tried re-queening a few with new queens from our supplier, but the same thing happened all over again.  So we decided to let nature take its course.  Most of our new package hives swarmed because of all the cells that they kept producing. Others completely absconded by the end of the season.

After it was all over we realized that their lack of food caused by the inability to forage, the mite treatments, and our inability to realize that we needed to feed the bees during the time of stress, all contributed to the problems that we were having.  The problem ended in a honey crop failure for us.  Lots of rain did not produce lots of usable nectar for our little bee friends.  Hopefully the goldenrod flow will be good this fall. We will try to get some this year, despite the fact that we have not had good luck chasing this elusive honey before.

Posted on by

Varroa Mites VS MAQS

Varroa mites are becoming more bothersome.  This year we treated in the spring and in the fall after we took our honey off.

Sticky boars have been our monitoring tool of choice.  When we used a sticky board to test we had results from 10 to 50+ mites dropped in a twenty four hour period.  This method of sampling is nice, neat and easy.  But I do see difficulties with it.  It only measure the number of mites being dropped. It does not measure those on the bees or, better yet, living in the cells.  It is the ones in the cells we need to worry about!  It does not seem like this sampling method takes into account any hygienic behavior either.  If the bees groom off mites as they come into the hive then a lot will drop, and I would assume that I have a ton of mites in the hive.  Instead, in this case, it would indicate the bees doing the hygienic job that we desire.  Maybe a better monitoring method is available.

We have treated in the spring and the fall with Formic Acid strips.  They actually look and feel more like a patty, but they are referred to as strips.  The product is called MAQS by NOD Apiary.  This will be the second year we have used this product.
MAQS may prove to be quite valuable because they claim it is not very hard on the bees and that it can kill mites in the capped brood cells as well as on the bees.   The strips smell harsh and the bees quickly move away from it when you get it near them, so I do not know how well it will work, especially in high concentrations in the long run.  Monitoring and planning hive ventilation and maximum daily temperatures during the treatment period are key when using this product.  So treating all the time with it may be difficult, even though treatment is allowed with the honey supers on.

Our spring treatment showed some mite drop, but the fall drop was enormous.  Hopefully it will save some of our colonies from dying from the parasitic mite.