so hello and welcome I'm Frederick Dunn and today I'm going to walk you through step by step how to
check for varro distractor mites on your bees using the dry powder sugar shake or sugar roll
method So today we're looking at leighton's hives finally these are insulated hives with sheep's
wool and I purchased both of these hives from Dr Leo sharashkin's website horizontalhive.com
so one of the things I also purchased was the wax Foundation that Dr Leo sells which came from Spain
thinking that the wax of course is coming from an area where industrial
pesticides are not in use therefore the foundation wax is a little better
so I'm going to show you some of the frames we pulled them up out of here these are lions
frames they do not match up with a standard langstroth frames so when you're working with
Leon's hives everything is unique to the lands Hive configuration right down to the frame sizes
but they're bigger so they accommodate The Brood better at least that's the theory
and I can't see that say that there's anything wrong with that some of the comb here is a little
wonky so I'm showing that the other thing is I keep all my frames in order so I don't shift
them around and it's perfectly fine with me if they make Bridge comb or Burr comb or they
spread their frames out at strange angles like that one was done also the frames form their own
cover board when you push them all together and this one I've added four new frames of foundation
so we're expanding this Hive this one is going pretty well we still have room for expansion there
horizontal hives instead of supering you just pull out the follow board and add frames as you go
so now we're on to another lands Hive and we're looking again at what would
be a honey super but these are just honey frames and it's interesting to notice the
sagging that's on this that's occurred with the foundation frames so you probably don't want to
expand them ahead of the population growth of the colony so that they can take care of it
this colony is full no more room for expansion which is why I had to buy more horizontal hives
in order to accommodate the extra here so I could try to keep their populations down
and expand but this one of course formed recently in fact it swarmed twice and every frame is in use
so here we go on the left I have a single entrance we've insulated this with reflectags I also have
insulated foam above that and I don't do any top venting through here and they build up remarkably
fast I highly recommend marking your frames so that you can keep them in order when you pull them
out and put them back in and then of course this one nfn means I had no Foundation however you want
to annotate your stuff that's fine and this is capped honey so they're doing great and again the
no Foundation actually looked a little better to me a little more consistent and they did connect
it down the sides and of course they leave plenty of vent room and passages through these frames
and by no Foundation I mean I just put the frame in here it's got the vertical wires on it but it
did not prime it with beeswax or anything else I just let the populations go and build as they will
and again if you're going to harvest honey from one of these you're basically going to make cut
Combs you're going to cut through it or you can uncap and crush and strain or whatever you
need to do if you want to get into Lane's hives exclusively and you want to spend the money they
do sell an extractor a motorized one through Dr Leo's website for eleven hundred dollars
good news about that is it'll handle not only these large lands frames but it will handle all
of your laying straw frames as well I already have a lengths throughout the frame extractor so I'm
not willing to spend the extra money to get one of these yet but we're just taking a look inside
and I'm also going to walk you through a sugar Shake here we're going to check these for mites
especially now that we've had a couple swarms from this one and brood is down it's a great time
to check for mice and if we have a decent might load we'll consider our control approaches there
so today again the frames the foundation's kind of all over the place I embedded the
wax Foundation onto the wires with heat so it should have held but if you've ever had those
Foundation wax from Dr Leah's website it's pretty thick stuff so if it gets really warm I can see
it sagging down as I did there if it says FN it means I put foundation on it nfn no Foundation
stir again six frames in and we find brood so from here to the entrance we have a lot of brood and
this brood concerns me a little bit so I'm looking at the frame here and I'm seeing some little
specks and spots in the cells they're not cleaned out that well but then I'm also seeing a bunch of
newbies here so they're very fuzzy they're light in color and they've probably emerged from their
cells within the past few days so we don't see any new brood no eggs no open larvae nothing
we do see some pollen stored here and we've still got some capped brood and this is enough
for me to think that if I've got veroda structure mites these are the bees you want to be counting
so I'm going to show you how to collect the bees what the quantities are and what the parameters
are for testing for the road instructor mites so I've got my kit here you can buy these kits online
this one came from Amazon you're going to need dry powdered sugar a glass Ball jar a half cup scoop
see if I can get that there as you can see it half cup measuring cup that gives you about 300 bees
and then a one tablespoon scoop and the screen top that we're going to put on the jar after
the bees are in it and we're going to put our dry powdered sugar through that screen
and of course I just take the tub and Mark it with all the parameters so you don't forget
put your name on it too you never know who might bother and borrow your stuff
so and of course everything you're supposed to do half a cup of bees two tablespoons of
sugar two minute groom time once the Sugar's on and then shake them vigorously for one minute
so that's what we're going to do and of course I have a colander and I have coffee filters now
you're going to want to take that lid off and we're going to shake nurse bees off of several
of the frames after we carefully check for the queen you don't want to be shaking the queen
into your tub and giving her that Sugar Shake even though she's probably going to survive it
it's good not to put her through it this really shows a really good brood pattern we're at the
end of it here there are still bees emerging from their cells everything looks pretty healthy here
but I still want to know the varroamite potential load so I've shaken a bunch of nurse bees from
two different frames into this tub and I let it sit here for a few moments because I want bees
that have been out foraging and flying to go ahead and leave and you'll find that the nurse
bees are very compliant they just kind of sit passively in the bottom there and you can very
easily come back and scoop them out with your half cup scoop that's what we're going to do right here
there we go 300 some people say it's up to 350. it's a rough estimate so we're going to shake our
bees in there and then we want to go ahead and get our screen top and we're going to put that
right on top there because we don't want them to come out although again they're pretty passive
and you can see in the bucket how easy to move around and if you have a nice smooth
plastic surface you can just pour them around very easy to manage nurse bees they're very laid back
and of course you'll just dump those back on the hive and let them go down inside while you
do your sugar shakes so and I wanted you to see the brood frame there we're going to put that
back in so they can benefit from the warmth inside although this is a nice hot day it's
83 degrees Fahrenheit and it's overcast so that's good news let's dump these out
they would eventually find their way back in but let's just get things going here so now we're
going to put our dry powdered sugar confectioner sugar right through the screen it would help if
you sifted it at a time because the more loose and powdery it is the better but this is also why
I don't dump it in first then put the lid on top I don't want clumps in there so that when I shake it
the heavy clumps would smash your bees so we're going to roll it around and make sure they're
good and sugar coated and then they're going to start grooming because obviously if they don't
want powdered sugar all over them and not only that their thorax is going to heat up and don't
forget they're going to do this for two minutes and I want to set them in the shade although it's
overcast so it's not that critical but here they are in the shade on the lid from the tub
so I'll take my colander here and I use bun coffee filters and they work really well
because when the time's done I'm going to give it the one minute agitation here then all I have
to do is wash it with fresh water and the varro distractor mice will have a nice clean contrast
so again the thoraxes are heating up they started grooming themselves you can see them
working their hind legs and raking their abdomens here and that's to dislodge the
mites so they've been doing that for two minutes let's give them a one minute Shake
and you want to give them a really good shake the goal is of course to help further dislodge mites
and any mites that they've groomed off will go with the sugar out onto your coffee filter
and keep this going for a full 60 seconds so it's helpful to have a stopwatch it's not critical if
you're off a few seconds here and there we just want to see what's going on so three
minutes we've had the two minute dwell time where the groom themselves and the one minute
Shake time now we've got particles here pretty good contrast so we can see what's going on
now we'll take the colander and we'll just rinse it with fresh water and of course we want these
bees to go back down below so we're going to dump them out on the backer boards here and they can
find their way in I had an interesting discussion with Dr Underwood recently who suggested that
maybe these sugar Shake bees don't live very long afterwards so that was an interesting discussion
and I'm just this is just fresh water we're gonna pour it through and the key here is not Deport
of course above the edges of your coffee filter and it will conform to the edges of the colander
and then when the filter ultimately dries out you get a nice white contrast too so
you'll be able to count whatever is in the filter
in this case this isn't anything at all like what I expected based on the appearance of The Brood
and what I thought wherever Road instructor my droppings in some of the cells I thought I would
be picking up I don't know 10 or 11 mites but here's what's going on this year with my beehives
I'm getting varel accounts like this there is one varroa might on this paper there it is right there
and here's the thing that viromaite is not dead so I sat this on the bench in my shop
I let it dry out I came out this was done on July 3rd I looked at it the morning of
July 4th and darn it that little varomite isn't walking around on the paper what's interesting
is it has nowhere to go and that's because they follow pheromones ferromites are blind
and he would be chasing down a b to climb back onto but given that I had taken this into my shop
he uh had no Bees to climb onto she I should say the males don't make it out of the cells at all
only the females and that's it one might so that's good news but I'm still suspicious I haven't been
finding very many varro Destructor mites on any of my hives this year so I don't know what's going on
anyway I vacuumed off the other bees that were left so I could close up shop here's the vacuum
open and all they do is get out and go back inside the hive I hope this was helpful have a fantastic
Fourth of July and the rest of your summer keep counting those Borough Destructor mites [Music]
thank you [Music]