🐝 How To Prepare Bees For Winter – Varroa Treatment Timing Explained – Episode Two

We're on to episode 2 of how to prepare your colonies for winter, and this week we're treating for varroa. Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Blackmans in Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. Episode 2 of preparing your colonies for winter. This week we're doing Apivar treatments as our autumn varroa treatment. Now, at this point of the year, you can use many different varroa treatments. You can use Apiguard or Thymovar, They're both thymol treatments. You can use Apivar, which is amitraz, so a miticide. And even if you wanted to, you could use Max as well. I'm not a massive fan of Max. It works fine, but I just hear too many people coming back to me saying that they've got issues with queen mortality and brood mortality. Definitely not one of my favorite treatments, especially at this time of year as well. Like, Max is great because you can use it when the supers are on. Once you've got all of those supers off, I see no need for Max. Especially when you're condensing the colonies down so much like that. You can get yourself into real trouble using mats at this time of the year with congested colonies. Now last week we took off all of the supers, we congested all of the bees down into a single brood box, we placed an upturned feeder on there to give the bees additional space, and we added a single block of fondant just to tide the bees over until we move into syrup feeding. Now all of these activities, these, these aren't weekly videos, these can happen On day 1, on day 2, and day 3. And the beauty of treating with Apivar is that you can feed at the same time. This is why I'm really a massive fan of Apivar. There are issues surrounding effectiveness and resistance against it, but for the time being, my bees still respond really, really well to Apivar. So for the foreseeable future, that's what I'll continue to use as my late summer, autumn treatment. So we've got the colony down, we've condensed it into that single box, we've got some fondant on to make sure that they've got A suitable amount of food just to keep them going. And now episode 2, we're going to put the Apivar strips in. Now Apivar strips, done plenty of videos on these. You're supposed to use 1 strip per 5 frames of national deep brood. Now in this colony here, we've got 10 frames of 14x12 brood. So if you work out the area, it's a lot closer to 15 frames of national deep brood. I think it works out about 13 frames. But the fact that you've got all of those additional bees in there as well, I'm going to use 3 whole strips spread evenly across the brood area, and I'm going to leave them in for 8 weeks. So enough talking, I'm going to get over there now and I'm going to show you how to apply Apivar to your colonies to treat them for varroa as you move them into winter. Right, let's get those Apivar strips in and let's look how congested the brood box is. So I think you'll agree that's a very congested brood box now, and as soon as you take the roof off Tap them down. You do lose loads of bees down the side. They're all trying to squeeze in to get away from the light, but this is what they should be looking like this time of the year. If you're condensing them down to one box, you're going to get bearding in the front, you're going to get bearding in that polyash forth feeder, but this is what you want. So what we're going to do now is we're going to shake off that fondant and we're going to get our Apivar strips in. So just jump straight in. Get that fondant off. You need to take that out to ensure that you're getting the strips in the right place. Shake any bees off it. You can go and put that over to one side. You don't need that just for the time being. Then what you need to do is you need to go through the frames and identify where the brood is. Like I said before, for Apivar strips, you want 1 strip of Apivar per 5 national deep frames, and then you need to extrapolate that as per the size of your overwintering configuration. The extra bees in here, I'm going to go for 3 strips evenly distributed throughout the brood box. So here's my colony now. I've got 3 Apivar strips in there spread evenly in between frames 2 and 3, frames 4 and 5, and frames 6 and 7. They're spread evenly, and as you can see, just look how many bees are in that box. They're not all going to fit in that box. We're going to get bearding outside the front, but again, just trust the process. This works really, really well. The colony is naturally contracting now, and it's going to make the Apivar treatment really effective by having all of the bees in that brood box. Now, at this point, again, you need to use your own judgment on this one. Depending on the weather, if it's going to be rainy, what I would suggest is get the fondant slab back in there, put the poly Ashford feeder back on upturned, give the bees enough room in here. If the weather is fine, You can jump straight onto episode 3 here, and episode 3 is gonna be feeding. It's entirely up to you what you're gonna do. For the purpose of this video though, I'm just gonna set it back up as we've had it. I'll pop the fondant back on there, polyash forth feeder upturned, and I'll give all of those bees enough space to congregate around that fondant. And there we go. That's the next part of getting your colonies ready for winter, and that is probably the most important part, is getting your varroa treatment on. Make a note of when you put your varroa treatment on. Apivar, it's an 8-week treatment, so you want to take it off 2 months, there or thereabouts, after you've put it on. Whatever you do, do not leave your Apivar strips in over winter. Perfect way to get the mites resistant to amitraz. And there we go, simple as that. It is amazing how many bees are in that box. Every time I do this every year, I think, how have you got so many bees in that box? If they start drawing comb in that box, Don't worry about it, just let it go. As soon as you've finished putting your Apivar in, you can move straight onto the feeders. I'm gonna cover that in the next video. We're gonna put sugar syrup in. Now you can do it at the same time. Don't think that you need to wait another week or another 2 weeks for that Apivar. As soon as you put your Apivar in, and we tend to do it at the same time, get your feeders on, get any fondant out of there, cut out any wax that they've built in that upturned polyash forth feeder. flip it over and you can start on your syrup feeding. But we'll cover all of that in episode 3, so stay tuned for the next episode. Hope you enjoyed that one though. 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