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NEW ZEALAND BEEKEEPER, FEBRUARY 2017
be your friendly commercial beekeeper moving his hives away during the day, leaving most of his field bees behind. Some of these will be carrying mites and they can quickly build up to damage your colonies. Several years ago, California beekeeper Randy Oliver recommended that New Zealand beekeepers start mite treatments on 18 February to give our bees two full months to produce mite-free bees for winter. Hives that have been split and those that have swarmed are not necessarily in danger at the moment, as varroa numbers will have halved when the hive divided. Your best-producing hives are at risk, however, as they will have had non-stop mite production since your last treatment. Start doing sugar shakes or alcohol washes now to determine your mite numbers per hundred bees. This may seem a lot of work, but it’s not too arduous if you do it while taking off the crop. Some beekeepers do these tasks at the same visit. Remove the honey, check the brood nest for disease, take 300 nurse bees off a frame of open brood and put in the treatment. Contrary to what is shown in the books, strips are best put against brood so the bees have to come in contact with them. I have seen new beekeepers follow the book and put the strips in outside frames, only to have the hive die because the bees didn’t make contact with the strips. We are seeing more mites resistant to Bayvarol® and Apistan®. For some apiaries, these treatments are still working well; others are not so good. Don’t skip or undertreat—use one strip per five frames of bees. Remember also that Apivar® takes time for the miticide to reach a mite-killing level, so it doesn’t work well if your hives are on the verge of collapse. Bees tend to move away from these strips so after a month, I suggest you reposition them amongst the brood again. Vapour treatments tend to work well but results are not uniform between colonies, so you have to monitor. Two weeks after the treatment, check mite numbers again to see whether the treatment you have applied has worked. You want them down to one mite or fewer per 100 bees. This means you still have roughly 1000 mites in colony of 30,000 bees, and that number doubles every 18 days if untreated. When you have more than 1000 mites in a hive, viruses start being transmitted to bee to bee by varroa. The previous threshold for treatment was more than five mites per 100 bees, but overseas research has shown that you have fewer winter losses if mite numbers are kept very low.
had one good day in three. The drizzly rain is warm enough to work bees in but is very wetting. Mānuka is halfway through flowering but in our area we also have bush sources amongst the mānuka. Kāmahi (which is more attractive to bees) has been flowering along the fringes, and also has had an extended flowering. Now mahoe (whiteywood: Melicytus ramiflorus ) is flowering, which has continued to divert the attention of bees from the mānuka. Consequently, there’s been no mānuka this year. At least the strong hives have put on a box of honey. I have added more supers but I don’t know whether the bees will fill them. Most of hives still have a full-depth super of brood, so it’s possible. It’s green and clover is flowering, but we need some dry, settled weather before it will produce nectar. It has been suggested that our weather should settle at the end of January and then we may get a summer and (perhaps) a very late clover flow. While the west coast of both islands has been cool and wet, the east coast has been hot and dry. Hives may have put on a box of honey before pastures dried. Some beekeepers are now feeding hives. I remember that when I wanted to go commercial beekeeping 45 years ago, our MAF Apicultural Officer talked me out of it. For the next two years there wasn’t a crop and I would have lost my house if I hadn’t taken his advice. In beekeeping you hold back money or honey to carry your bees through the bad years, and you only build up numbers on the profit from your existing hives. Beekeeping is too risky to do this on bank loans when your whole income is based on a six-week time period. Start winter preparations now Regardless of the conditions this season, beekeepers have to do several important tasks in February. It might be summer, but we need to prepare our colonies for winter. Requeen any with a poor brood pattern. Some commercial beekeepers put 10-day-old protected queen cells in all their colonies so they all have new queens going into winter. There’s a huge advantage to doing this. First, new queens start with a hiss and a roar and produce lots of brood longer into the autumn than older queens. New queens generally don’t swarm in their first year, so overall hive management is easier. Also, new queens usually produce more honey than a second-year queen. These commercial beekeepers have fewer hive losses due to queen failure during the winter. I’m not really a commercial beekeeper (too old and too slow now), so I select the hives I requeen. I’m also selecting colonies I can use as breeding stock, as locally produced bees tend to be better adapted to the area. Already I have seen quite a few hives superseding their queens. (I mark my queens and therefore it’s easy to tell.) You can also see it in the brood pattern around the expanding brood area: no missed cells and uniform brood all of the same age. Perhaps the bees have blamed the condition of the hives on the queens and replaced them. Treating for varroa It’s time to remove spare honey from hives and put in miticide treatments. If you are part of a club, ApiNZ Hub or branch, try and get everybody around you to treat at the same time so we get an even kill, with no ‘mite bombs’. Watch Dennis vanEngeldorp’s YouTube talk ‘Bee Culture Education: Everything Varroa’ (there are several parts to the video). In December, I found a couple of apiaries with high mite numbers and deformed wing virus. It’s a reminder that things out there cause these mite bombs. I believe the cause is collapsing feral hives, but it also could
It’s very important for the suburban beekeeper to provide water.
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