In this instructional video, Laurence Edwards of Black Mountain Honey demonstrates how to use Mites Away Quick Strips (MAQS), a formic‑acid based varroa treatment, on colonies that are heavily infested late in the season. He explains why MAQS is his only viable option when supers are on the hive, outlines the severe varroa symptoms that trigger immediate treatment, and stresses the product’s temperature sensitivity (must be below 25 °C) and the risk of queen loss. Edwards details safety precautions (full face mask, eye protection), dosage calculations (approximately one strip per five brood frames, two strips for a full colony), and the step‑by‑step application: unseal the strip, place it on a queen excluder under the supers, ensure full‑width ventilation, leave it for seven days, then remove it. He diverges from the label’s eight‑day honey harvest rule, extending a quarantine period to 36 days for personal peace of mind. The video also covers expected efficacy (up to 99 % varroa kill, especially in capped brood), post‑treatment monitoring, and the dramatic colony recovery observed after a few brood cycles. Finally, Edwards situates MAQS within an integrated pest‑management plan that includes an oxalic acid blast at Christmas and a standard autumn treatment to prevent severe infestations.
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Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No-Nonsense Beekeeping. Today I'm going to show you how to use Max. So this is how Max comes, comes in tubs of 10, or you can buy individual strips of it as well, I think. It's definitely not my favourite varroa treatment. Why? I'll just put that out there. There's a few restrictions in terms of the temperature use on this product, and you can have issues with queen failure on it as well. So definitely not my favorite, but it is quite effective. And I've had experience of it in the past where you have really badly infected varroa colonies and you need to do an immediate treatment, an immediate quick treatment in season with the honey supers on. You've only really got Max as an option. That's the only one that I would use at this time of year. So you'd have seen, you would have seen in the previous video, we're here in the deceased beekeeper's apiary. We've got colonies here that haven't been treated for, we think, up to 24 months, but we know for at least 12 months. We've got guaranteed signs of severe varroa infestation. So we've got deformed wing virus, badly, we've got visible mites present within the colony, and we've got holes in brood. For me, those 3 things alone show me that I really urgently need to treat. So in this video, all we're going to do is just show you how to use Max. So first thing to say with Max is you don't need to take your honey supers off. So that's, that's a real big benefit with Max. You do not need to take your honey supers off, but you cannot harvest your honey within the 7-day treatment period. So you put your tabs on for 7 days, take them off, and then the instructions say that you can take your honey off on the 8th day. Now, I do not buy into that at all, and I really, really don't like that advice, even though it's probably scientifically proven. I always put a quarantine period on honey supers that have been through a Max treatment, and I put that period of 4 weeks. So scientifically, it's been proven on day 8 I can take honey from this colony. I add on further 28 days. So I say on day 36 from when I put the tabs on, and that's just for my own kind of sanity. I don't want anything getting into my honey. I don't want it to be affected. So that's all I do. That's what Max says to do, and that's what I do. The next thing to say is it's highly affected by heat. So other treatments, it doesn't matter what temperature you use it on. The Max, if it's above 25°C, you can have real issues with, issues with the brood, but issues with killing the queen as well. It can kill the queen, or the queen can kind of abscond in that temperature. So make sure you're doing it kind of on a coolish day. We've waited here today, it's been about 30°C here last few days, and it's gone down today to like 22°C, 23°C, and it's forecast to go a little bit cooler next week as well. So we're safe to get in and use the Max now. So all I'm going to do in this video is show you how to put Max onto your hives to protect them and treat against varroa. So you've got to be really, really careful. Here's a safety warning for you. Max is horrible stuff. It's formic acid. It's the stuff that stinging ants use at a much, much higher concentration. Make sure you've got really, really good protection on your eyes and your lungs. So face mask, preferably a full one, if not, definitely eye protection and then a single face mask as well. So we're going to run through it here and I'm not going to open the tabs. I'm going to come back later in the day with my face mask and do the full setup with the tabs. So you need to get your dosage right with Max. It comes in strips like that, and the dosage is 2 strips per full colony. Now I take that to mean 1 strip per 5 frames of brood, and that's always worked for me in the past. So this colony here, we're not even on 5 frames of brood, so I'm safe to use just 1 strip of Max. I've got another colony over there where it is a bit bigger, but it's still really badly impacted, and on that one I will use 2 strips. So you just need to make sure that you get the dosing correct, read the label, and work it to your specific colonies. So this is what the strips look like. Formic acid, all you do is you open up the plastic and you place them onto the colony. It's as simple as that really. They've made it really, really easy for you. You obviously just make sure you need to take the plastic off them though. Leave it on for 7 days, close the colony up, make sure you've got full width of ventilation because you need to ventilate this product through. You can't do it with a reduced entrance. Come back in 7 days and I'll remove the strips, and it's as simple as that. So like I say, all you do is you take the package like that once you've unsealed it, and you just place it on top of a queen excluder, and then you can put your supers safely on top of it again. So you would take your supers, place them on top, and that's the application complete. You just need to wait 7 days, then you come in and you take that packaging away. Like I say, make sure you're always using a full face mask, or at least a mask and some eye protection. Formic acid is really, really horrible stuff. You don't want to get it in your lungs, you don't want to get it in your eyes. So then once all your colonies are treated, strap them back up again and you wait 7 days, and you come back and you remove those strips, and that should kill a high, high proportion of the varroa that's within that colony. Now, the benefit of Max, unlike other products, is that it kills varroa that's sitting within the capped brood. So it should pretty much wipe out, say, 99% of the varroa within this colony. That gives you a really, really good drop rate. So if you were to put a board in here, monitoring board, it would give you a great indication of the amount of varroa coming down. So we'll take a look at the varroa in another After that, it's really, really good just to kind of keep an eye on the colony and watch them improve. If Max works successfully, you do see quite a dramatic kind of pickup in the colony. Give it a couple of cycles of brood, so maybe kind of 6 or 7 weeks' time, and they really, really do bounce back, and it can be quite a dramatic bounce back. So it is a good product, but the best way of dealing with colonies like this is don't let them get like that in the first place. So I will not be doing any more experiments with not treating my colonies. They'll get their regimented treatments, one as an oxalic blast at Christmas time, and then they'll get a standard autumn treatment as well, because that's when the colonies, the varroa numbers, are peaking within the colony. So I hope you've enjoyed this video. Please hit the subscribe button, please hit the bell so you're notified of every video, and I'll see you next time.
