Do You Want To Kill Varroa Mites FAST?

If you want to kill varroa mites fast, then winter is the time to strike. No long inspections, no faffing around even opening the beehive. I'm going to show you a technique to go in, kill as many mites as you possibly can in the winter without even opening a beehive. So this is why a winter treatment can hit so hard. Varroa mites are present in the colony all the way throughout the year, but they reproduce underneath the wax cappings. That means if you've got lots of brood, you've got lots of varroa. But when you get a natural brood break in the winter, if you time your varroa treatment, your oxalic acid-based sublimation treatment, to coincide with this natural brood break, the varroa are still inside the beehive, but they're not protected underneath the wax cappings anymore. They're on the back of the bees and you're able to get at them with a good oxalic acid sublimation. So how do you know that the bees in your beehive, the colony, is actually broodless without going in and checking? So the system that I use and the way that I establish what is going on inside the colony without looking inside is by using temperature and day length. I've got my HiveWatch system set up here, and what that did is that it told me very early on in December there was a cold snap. It went down from about 7 or 8 degrees at night to down below 1 or 2 degrees. I saw a real dip on the data that came from the HiveWatch sensor. And what that showed me, but more importantly showed the queen, was that's probably a good time in the season to stop laying eggs. So I identified with the temperature sensors inside this hive a really good trigger for the queen to stop laying. Now, if I went in the day after and checked the colony, there'd still be loads of brood because the brood takes quite a long time to go through the metamorphosis process, to go from egg to larva to pupa and then actually out into a bee. And we can't do any treatment until All of that cycle has gone all the way through. So this is the system that I use here. It's called my 3-week system. I identify that trigger cold point, the first real overnight frost of the season. I then fast forward a full 3 weeks to go through that metamorphosis period, hoping that the queen has stopped laying after the trigger, and then during that 3-week period she hasn't recommenced and all of the brood has just naturally emerged. Now I tested this and validated this in 2025. These are videos that I've been doing previously today, and I can show you all of the data here. So you can look on the graph, you can see the cold trigger. You can see that my proposed treatment period falls 3 weeks after the trigger date. And I went into those colonies earlier today, went through every single frame, which I do not recommend you do at home, but I did that to validate the approach and to help try and educate people and get them doing their treatments at the right period in the year. So in 2025, it all worked very nicely indeed. But now that we've got this natural brood break, what do we do? How do we kill those mites? That is what I'm gonna show you now in this video. So now you've got all of the mites onto the back of the bees, you need a way of getting them off. My recommendation for you for a winter treatment, no matter where you are in the world, is to use some form of oxalic acid treatment. Now, the rules and regulations in your country will be different, so make sure you check what works for you. In the UK, there's a brand new product that's come out called Viroxol, which is very expensive for what it is, but it is a legitimate approved oxalic acid-based treatment that doesn't have any gunk in it. There used to be a product called Apibioxol, which was the previously approved product that had like 20% glucose and fillers. And when you combine that with the brilliant Instant Vap Turbo, which is by far and away the best oxalic acid-based sublimation device in the world, barring none— and trust me, I have tried every single one— then you create this intense jet of oxalic acid-based sublimate that when fired into a beehive kills the vast majority of those phoretic mites on the back of the bees. Now, a few words of caution before I show you exactly how to do that, and I'll do that in this video, but oxalic acid and all of the oxalic acid-based treatments are horrible. Make sure you wear gloves, make sure you wear goggles, make sure you use an approved 3M organic gas respirator. I'll stick the link at the bottom of the video for the ones that I recommend. So I've tried a lot of different PPE as well when it comes to using organic acid, and sometimes you'll see the full face mask ones. I don't recommend those because I find they mist up really quickly, and then I want to take them off because they're misty. The most important bit here is the organic gas respirator, and I find the little half mask ones like that, even when these fully mist up and you have to take them off for a little bit, you leave them on, which is the most important thing, which is protecting your lungs from the horrible chemicals inside oxalic acid. And then the final part of the PPE, got some nice gloves in there as well, Gwynny Griff orange gloves. So it's worth saying at this point, if you want to get the Instant Vap Turbo, head over to gwenygriff.co.uk. I'll put it up underneath because there's no way you'd work it out from the way that I say it. It's the only place in the UK to buy the Instant Vap Turbo. So the Instant Vap is a very simple device. You get to specify which battery packs you want. I like the Makita ones. I've got a 6 amp-hour battery and it just slides in like that. The way it works is even simpler. You have this little tube that comes out here, and then if you twist this tube here, you effectively dictate the dose of oxalic acid or the treatment that you're going to use. So you can see on the bottom there, So it says 1, 2, 3, and 4, and then if I twist this here, it will move it down to those numbers. Now generally the advice is if you want to use it for a nuc, you want to give a 2 gram dose, and if you want to use it for a full-size colony, you give it a 4 gram dose. So I'm going to get this one all the way up to 4 grams and give it a full dose of VarroaXal into 2 beehives over there. Be super careful when you're dealing with oxalic acid. Do make sure you use the PPE. This is not one to skip. Even Zane, who's doing the videography, has got full PPE on as well. So the way that you get the product, the oxalic acid, from here into the machine is by opening up the lid like that, taking your tube, give it a little shake, dumping it in, and then it's filled this tube. So when I plunger it out, it all just comes back out again. Now all I'm going to do is just do that, put it over to the machine, and then when I hit the plunger, it's going to fire it down into the pan, and then that pan Burst it out as a really hot jet of oxalic acid vapor. I'll show you exactly how it works now. So before I show you how to use the Instant Vap, there's 3 main reasons why winter treatments can fail. The first one could be you've not timed it correctly to coincide with that natural brood break. Use the 3-week rule combined with that cold trigger, and you'll find a really good period for treating your bees. The second one is you time it perfectly, you use the 3-week rule, you get the natural brood break, and then you go ahead and use oxalic acid like this, and you don't seal the hive up properly. I'm going to show you how to do that. I'm going to show you how to make the most of the oxalic acid, but don't do all of the hard work and then fail at the last hurdle. And then the final one that I see so many people getting wrong is that they time the brood break perfectly, they identify the natural brood break, they're using the right treatments, and then they go ahead and do it in the wrong conditions. When you're treating with oxalic acid sublimate, you want the temperature to be as warm as it can possibly be without triggering the bees to go out and fly. You don't want this super tight cluster, which is where I see a lot of people going out and treating. Because if you have a tight cluster, what that gives is those phoretic mites protection around them. The sublimate cannot penetrate through the cluster, so it cannot target the mites that are in the middle. Try and identify a day like today, which is perfect. It's about 7 or 8 degrees Celsius. There's no chance of the bees going out and flying. But if I open a couple of lids, you'll see there's clusters, but they're very loose. The sublimate can penetrate, and that is what makes the combination of all of these treatments and timing so effective. So the way that the Instant Vap works is super simple. We put the battery in, you press the button, you wait for it to get to 260°C, which is the optimum temperature to convert oxalic acid in its physical form directly into a gas. That process there is called sublimation. The only thing left I need to do is take out this plunger that's full of the Viroxyl, place it into this tube, and then hit the plunger. Now you're probably thinking, why did I not just show you that instead of talking about it? I've not got my PPE on, so I'm going to put my PPE on. We'll go and do a couple of test runs over there, and I'll show you just how powerful the Instant Vap Turbo is. So now that you've seen the Instant Vap in action, let me show you what happens if you fire that into a colony without sealing it up first. You'll see the vapor escaping all the way throughout the hive, and what you need to do is trap it in for as long as possible so that it can condense down on those bees and kill the varroa mites. Right, so I'm not taking off my mask now because there's just too much vapor in the air, but all I'm going to do is put the inspection tray in, jam it in with a little bit of cloth like this. Do that on the front if you've got any gaps up there as well, and then watch the difference. Look how much sublimate stays in the heart. You can see, even a few minutes after vaping the hive, we've still got vapor coming out. And if I lift up that entrance there, you can see the whole hive is still full of vapor. Do whatever you can to keep the vapor inside the hive. So you can probably see the goggle mask still on my face there. Do wear your PPE if you're doing any sort of oxalic acid sublimation. You can also see the vapor still just coming out of that final hive where I blocked it up properly. It does make all the difference, and I didn't used to block it up. Going forward, I will be blocking up every single floor or every single entrance or mesh that you have on to make sure that you keep the sublimate inside. We spoke a little bit about time trimmings there and trying to identify that first cold snap of the year and then adding on 3 weeks, I coincide that with the length of day as well. So if I get a really nice early cold snap in November, then the 3-week rule will apply. But if I don't get a cold snap before the 21st of December, which is the shortest day of the year, the winter solstice, then I go ahead and treat on the winter solstice. The 21st of December is effectively my backstop, but the 3-week rule gives you a really nice precise trigger either before Christmas or after Christmas into January, February to Identify that natural brood break where oxalic acid treatments become very, very effective. So how do you know if all of that treatment has worked? If you go in 24, 48 hours after and you look at the monitoring board, you will see hopefully a lot of dead mites. But seeing a lot of dead mites isn't necessarily a good thing. And there is a scenario where you could go in and see no mites whatsoever, and that's the best thing in the world because you've just got a naturally low number of mites on the bees. So it's hard reading too much into what you're going to see on the board. I would say if you see a lot of mites, you've done a good job, you've killed all of those mites. If you don't see that many mites, don't worry too much about it. And what I would say is repeat the cycle every 5 days. What might have happened is that all of the mites are still in a little cluster of brood, and then if you go in 5 days after, all of those mites will be back out on the bees as phoretic bees, and you can target them again. Obviously, look at the regulations where you are, but regular 5-day interval treatment of oxalic acid sublimation will really hit the varroa So don't worry if the first time you don't get as many mites as you think there might be. So here's my final thoughts when it comes to oxalic acid sublimation. Do not treat it lightly and make sure you use all of your PPE. Try and time that treatment with a naturally occurring brood break and use the 3-week rule after a cold trigger to identify that prime period. If you see lots of mites dropping after 24 or 48 hours, you've done a good job. You've killed lots of mites. If you're not seeing the mites dropping, repeat it every 5 days and eventually you'll get every single one. You'll never get it to a point where there's no varroa in your colony, and even if you did, they'd be reinfected pretty much straight away because they are in every single colony in the UK. But you have to keep on top of them because varroa over the long term will wipe your bees out and you'll have to start again from scratch. So don't treat just because it's winter, treat because there's a natural brood break occurring and it means your oxalic acid acid will be so much more potent. If you want to learn new skills like this, check out 14daybeekeeper.com where my online course will take you from a beginner to a competent beekeeper in just 14 days.