- Hi there we're gonna talk about using screen bottom boards and sticky papers for monitoring
mites in our colonies.
Now let's show you how that works in set up.
We'll have a look at the bits and pieces.
So here we're at one of our hives that's set up with a screen bottom board on it.
The bottom board is down here, it's a normal bottom board.
But our bottom boards are cut so they're flush with the box.
And then we have a frame here that has a screen built into it.
I'll show you what that looks like.
There's the normal bottom board.
It would normally be positioned like this with the entrance going out that way, and
to set this up what we do is we turn that around.
And then on top of that we put our screen bottom board.
And we put that in a way that the entrance is facing this direction, so that's still
the entrance now, and then we insert a piece of masonite that acts as a tray in here.
So that tray stays in there all the time and it collects debris that falls down onto that.
When we want to be testing for varroa mite levels we put our sticky paper in here, we'll
show you how to prepare that sticky paper in a moment, but that sticky paper goes in
and it sits on top of this tray in there and then we close that up.
Again, all that's happening down here at the bottom of the hive.
So when we want to monitor mites, we can put that in we leave it in for three days, we
pull that out, and then we count the mites.
We then divide by three and we can calculate a daily mite fall with that.
So these screen bottom boards have some advantages.
Once they're set up on a hive you can monitor for mites at any time quite simply.
It's nondestructive, you don't have to kill any bees to do this testing, and for our research
purposes we are able to monitor how effective our miticides are on a daily basis.
We can constantly be replacing these every three days and then we know how well the miticides
are working in a colony.
So there's some real advantages to having this set up.
We have plans for constructing these on our website.
They're also on the Ontario Beekeepers Association website.
Very simple little device.
Now let's have a look and see how we prepare these sticky boards.
Nancy's gonna show us how we prepare our sticky papers and what materials we use.
- Hi, so, first of all we use a file folder that's the lightest color - this is manila
- that we can find because we wanna have a good contrast between the mites, which are
kind of a dark brown, and the paper.
So this is important first of all to have the right color of file folder.
It's a messy job so you want to make sure that you've got something set up that's protecting
your surface and then we use a little tiny paint roller.
These are available even at the dollar store - they're quite cheap - and then we're going
to coat really thickly this entire surface with Crisco.
And we've melted it here on a little heater, you can use a pot, we just used the simplest
thing possible.
And this works really great for us and so you're just gonna want to coat this up.
- Looks good, so do you do this just before you use them, then, Nancy?
- Yeah, so we don't wanna do this too early because we wanna really make sure that the
mites are sticking to this surface.
The other thing that we're going to do is when we go out to the hive we're gonna be
sure that we use some sort of identifier.
Here we use numbers, but you could use the color of the hive or the location, whatever
works for you.
But it's really important to put that in a couple of different places just in case it
doesn't show up when you take it out, and you always want to use a pencil.
Pen will deteriorate over time and you can't read it.
- So it's not really sticky, it's just kinda gooey and the mites stick to it somewhat.
- Yeah
- Now we used to use insect trap coatings, it was far too sticky.
Everything was sticky: our phones, our door handles.
This is much nicer to use.
So, Stephanie is going to bring in a sticky paper here just fresh out of a hive and show
you how we count them.
- Yeah, so, when we collect a sticky paper, we leave them in for three days.
When we take them out they have quite a lot of debris that you'll have to sift through
to find those mites.
So, when you bring them to your table, I like to use a pencil and make a grid to be able
to keep track of what I'm counting.
So just whatever size grid you're comfortable with.
And then within each square I like to count up how many mites, and if there are quite
a lot of mites you can write down the number.
And you just start sifting through the debris.
You may have to move around anything to get under to see where the mites are, but, you
just start counting.
- [Paul] And what do you look for to differentiate the mite from all that debris?
- [Stephanie] Yeah, so the mites are quite shiny and very hard-looking as opposed to
other debris that might be soft that you can poke with your pencil.
They're gonna be very oval and they may even have their legs still attached, so you wanna
look for anything that is that distinctly different than the rest of the debris.
- Right, so you count up each grid, write the numbers down, and then tally the whole
group?
- Yes
- That gives you your three day count, and then what do you do?
- And then once we've counted up the paper, we use this Excel sheet that we've printed
out.
It has our information for the yards, so we have our yard identifier, our colony number,
the dates that we had them in and that we took them out, the number of mites that are
on the entire page, and then we divide by, in our case, three for the amount of days
that it was in, and then that will give you the mites per day in your colonies and those
correspond to different levels of acceptable mites that you can have.
- It's a pretty simple process, somewhat time-consuming, but it does give you a real good snapshot
and this is the method that we use most frequently for monitoring mites in our colonies.
Coming up next, we'll look at an alcohol wash bath.