Our most recent visit was last week when we removed the last of the Apiguard treatment.
Most of the hives showed a very low mite drop at the start of the treatment and that continued throughout the 4 weeks the treatment was on.
We were a bit late in putting the Apiguard on this year as we kept on taking off frames for extraction until end of August. I think we have just managed to get away with the temperature as Apiguard needs an outside temperature of not less than 15°C.
The link below is to the NBU Managing Varroa Leaflet and takes you to page 25 which has a table of all the authorised treatments and when and how to apply.
APHA_Managing_Varroa_2020_ELECTRONIC_ONLY-1.pdf (nationalbeeunit.com)
We took the opportunity to have a good look through the hives as it was a reasonable day and it is worthwhile to do a thorough check before you close them down for the winter. All the hives had worker brood in all stages, we only saw the Queen in one hive but seeing eggs is good enough. They had very little stores so we removed top supers which were empty and re-arrranged frames to just leave one super on each hive.
Our small hive 2, which had CBPV in the Spring, surprised us with the amount of brood and bees there. It seems the Queen has put a spurt on as the last time we looked we were worried it wouldn’t be strong enough to go through the winter.
Another surprise was the WBC hive. This had been left at our last visit 2 weeks ago with an unmarked queen, briefly seen but looked like a virgin. Now, there are large patches of nice looking worker brood so against all odds she has got mated well.
As logistically it is difficult for us to feed with syrup, we put large amounts of fondant on each hive and we will still be doing regular checks on the fondant levels.
So, it seems at the moment that we have 5 queen-right colonies all with enough bees and brood to go through the winter.
