I have not seen any on my bottom board yet today Jay and I will be putting strips in the hive
Hi Claire
I don't count; they are too darn small. Just wipe them off the board and say goodbye.
Hi, Scott,
Did you have much mite drop? I'm assuming you put the formic pro pads on your three TBA nucs and your successfully overwintered colonies. Do share the results, please.
It's very possible the nucs the TBA got were treated better than the nucs I got. I know one or two other people who put formic pro on TBA nucs and had very little drop.
Put Formic Pro on last Friday. One more week to go.
I’m putting Formic Pro on my hives tomorrow
I’ve been using Varoxsan strips for the past few weeks.
im taking this as a warning
Good Plan Claire. Can't assume you mites are under control,.
No one hates doing alcohol washes more than I do. So I just went ahead and put formic pro (FP) pads on three of my new nucs which I didn't get through the club. They went on on May 21, nine days ago.
The results were shocking. The colonies were very strong. Two deeps, lots of "happy" bees coming and going. Sound familiar?
Day 1 after putting on FP on on hive 1. 137 mites and ten larva! Even for a colony with 40,000 bees, that's a lot of mites. AND I've never seen larva drop with formic pro. I think that's a great sign that the colony is hygienic. I'm going to raise queens from this colony. I'll create a cell builder colony tomorrow by putting a frame of eggs and young larva in a small hive box with lots of nurse bees and food. If they build multiple queen cells I'll separate them and put them into separate mating nucs.
(I put the 137 mite count into mitecalculator.com. It asks a few questions like number of boxes with brood and estimate the size of the colony. Mine was strong, 40,000. It estimated my phoretic % at 1.79 and under capped brood at 2.38. It didn't matter what the percentages said, that's way too many mites.)
Since then, the drop has been about 25 per day.
Hive 2 had ONE mite the day after I put the pads on. Great, yes? Then there was 10, 50, 53, 103, 175 (today). No larva dropped.
Hive 3 is offsite. It had 23 the day after the installation of the pads. Haven't been back since. Offsite colonies are harder to monitor.
The point is: I had a problem and would have lost the colonies if I didn't treat. Formic pro is the only product that kills mites that are under the capped brood. Sometimes it kills the queen. Sometimes the queen stops laying eggs when the formic pro is on and she could take up to a week or more after the pads come off. Better to lose a queen than a colony. I've raised a couple of queens already and have them as a backup. You should too.
My plan is to do an oxalic acid treatment about a week after the pads come off. If it looks ok (?) I'll lay varroxSan strips on top of the frames.
Learn from my story. Test for mites.