Here is the link - Varroa Management Decision Guide
This is a good tool to help you decide the best way to treat under all conditions.
Try it!
The tool Rick sent us to is interactive. It asks you a question. You answer it and it asks you another question and another. Based on your answers it tells you what your options are. Everyone should check it out.
Here is the document you are trying to link to. This document has been on our website for 4 years. For a couple of years it was prominently on the front page with a note that it was imperative reading for all beekeepers.
HBHC-Guide_Varroa_Interactive_7thEdition_June2018.pdf
I just put it back on the front page of the site.
Rick,
This is great info. I couldn't get the link to work from the forum nor would it let me cut and paste it. Perhaps it's just me.
It's from the Honey Bee Health Coalition and available on their website. www.honeybeehealthcoalition.org. resources varroa management varroa management decision guide. IT'S GREAT! Everyone should be using this to understand the options and the issues.
We have 4 hives and knew that we should be checking for varroa mites. Our research said that we should sample monthly when the bee population is increasing so as not to let the mite population get out of control.
We noticed that one of our hives didn't have the heavy supers that the other three had even though there was a good queen with lots of eggs, larvae, and capped brood in the brood nest. We used the alcohol wash method using the double jar and screen setup that Chris & Patsy Weber made. We collected 1/2 cup of nurse bees from a brood frame which is about 300 bees (made sure the queen was not part of the group), put them in the jar, poured rubbing alcohol over them, and shook them for 2 minutes. We then counted the mites and this hive had 31 mites - Yikes! You just divide this by 3 to get your % which was a little over 10% . . . much too high as 3% is a tolerable number. So we put a single Formic Pro strip between our 2 brood boxes which we will remove in 10 days and follow up with a second strip for another 10 days. And then we will sample again to see if our treatment was effective.
We sampled our other three hives with the same method and had varying results. One had 4.3% which we treated with Formic Pro; one had 3% which we did not treat; and one had 0 . . . yup - ZERO mites which we cheered and did not treat.
Here is a link to the Honey Bee Health Varroa Decision Management Guide which is a cool interactive program that gives options for varroa treatment.
https://cantilever-instruction.com/varroatool/story_html5.html