Stop Treating Varroa Too Late - The Simple Change That Boosted My Honey Yield

This one simple change massively improved my honey crop. So I previously did a video talking about all the different ways to maximize your honey crop, but I just want to double down on this one simple change that I made about 4 years ago now on the advice of someone who's got way, way more experience than me. I second-guessed it at the time, I challenged it, I said maybe I don't think you're right, and he said believe me, this is the way that you need to do it. If you do it, I guarantee that you'll increase your honey crops. I've done it for 4 years now, and without a shadow of a doubt, it's boosted my honey crops every single year, and it's given me a beautiful byproduct in that it's reduced the amount of colonies that die in the winter. Now, that simple change is moving my treatment cycle for varroa to a point where it suits the bees. I'd gone on for years thinking, well, I'm going to treat the bees for varroa when it suits me as a beekeeper. I'm going to build them up in the spring, I'm going to get them nice and strong, I'm going to try and stop them swarming, I'm going to wait until there's not a drop of nectar left in any of the flowers and the trees, I'm going to collect all of my honey, probably extract it at the same time, and then think, all right, okay, right, let's do some varroa treatments, and it's the 1st of October. I genuinely did that for about 3 or 4 years thinking that I was doing the right thing, because you can't do varroa treatments when you've got honey supers on. It says that on the packaging. So my natural conclusion was, well, I'll wait until my honey supers are off before I do my varroa treatments. It's a natural assumption to make. And I always thought, well, I can't put the varroa treatments in before because the honey supers are there. Can't taint them using Apivar. Says it on the packaging, and it's a well-known fact that you can't treat bees with Apivar whilst your honey supers are on. And it wasn't until I spoke to this bee farmer and he said, well, Why don't you just take the honey supers off earlier and put your treatments on earlier? And my natural greedy response was, well, I'll end up losing loads of my late season honey crop. It's North Wales, the bees only forage late on in the year. I don't get the early bumper crops that people get down south. And let's go back to the beginning of this video. What we're talking about here is the one simple change that I made to maximize and give me a bumper honey crop. And my advice to you is to cut the honey season short. And you're probably having the same response that I had at this time, which was, that doesn't make sense. Like, what you want to do is lengthen the honey season. That's how you're going to get more honey, not shorten it down like this. So he said, look, try it, try it on a couple of colonies, maybe one apiary, and see how you get on with it. Didn't say anything to me about potentially boosting the survival rate of the colonies. He said, I'm doing this to get maximum amount of honey. So this is what I did, and this is what I do now. 15th of August is my day. I do it on a weekend, so wherever it is, if it's the 13th or the 17th, doesn't matter. Around the middle of August, regardless of the weather, regardless of the status of the colonies, regardless of how much honey they've already got on them, what I do is I take off all of my supers, every single one. If there's 6 supers on, if there's 3 supers on, doesn't matter. I take off my supers, I blow the bees out, I take all of the supers off to my honey extraction room, and then I come back around my colonies and I add my Apivar strips. I put a polyash forth feeder on top, and I feed the bees with twelve litres of syrup. Really efficient. I like efficiency. I don't like doing things twice. So in a single day, I've extracted the honey from an apiary. I put my treatments on, and I fed my bees. At that point, I leave the bees alone. Don't do anything to them until kind of middle to back end of September. What's going on at that point of the year is that the bees are probably clustering up out the front because they're saying, "You have not left us enough room here." Within 4 or 5 days, they tend to compress down and get back into that box, but I like that compression because it means that the bees are really rubbing up against each other like this, and that's the way that Apivar works. It gets onto their little feet, they walk it around everywhere, that's how it gets in contact with the mites. So first thing is I'm getting a very effective use of the Apivar because I'm compressing my colonies down. Second thing is I'm reducing the amount that I need to feed my bees. Because I'm giving them some of their natural summer flow back, and I'm also giving them all of the late season flow back. So everything ivy, I'm never contemplating taking an ivy crop off the bees because up here it's so sporadic anyway, but I leave all of that to the bees. So what that means is come the back end of September, or even take it into the, the first or second week of October, I've done my full 8-week cycle of my varroa treatments. Previously, that's when I was just about to start the 8-week cycle of my varroa treatments. But what I've also got there is big booming strong colonies that have naturally built up because I've given them a little bit more feed. And you open the boxes up at this point, middle of October, back end, to take the Apivar strips out. And every single time I open these colonies up, I'm surprised just how healthy they look. Beautiful frames of brood, no deformed wing virus, massive varroa drops. And I've got my bees to a point And this is the critical part of this, in that when they're going to produce their winter bees, which is anywhere from in North Wales maybe like mid to end October, I've got the colony to a point where the varroa load is very, very low. And this is where I didn't fully understand this before, which was I thought, well, I'm treating the bees for varroa at the time of the year where it suits me and it doesn't make a difference. That was my real life view in that it doesn't make a difference. And only having done this myself do I realize that it makes a huge, huge difference, because the success of your colonies going through the winter is completely reliant on the health of your winter bees. The health of your winter bees is dictated by the amount of varroa that's in your colony when those bees are produced. So you look at my colonies, number one question I get asked is, how do you get your colonies bubbling over so big in the spring? They look huge. Mine don't look that huge. How do you get that? Part of it's genetics, part of it is this early varroa treatment. So let's rewind again for the final time, I promise. This video is the single one thing that you need to do to maximize your honey crop. Now, as I bring these colonies into spring, the difference of what they look like in terms of a status snapshot in March and April versus how they looked before is like chalk and cheese. They are ready to go, they're ready to build up, they're ready to expand. Because those winter bees are so healthy. It means I've got more winter bees, which means that when the season does get underway, the queen can lay as quickly as she likes because there's so many winter bees there, and they just exponentially grow that colony, which means that I get more summer bees as a result of the amount of winter bees and healthy winter bees that I brought through. Keep all of those bees together, do a preemptive Demarée split or any other method of vertical split that means you're not splitting your bees, And you will get the biggest honey crop you've ever got in your life. If you enjoyed that video, hit the thumbs up, definitely hit the subscribe button. We've got loads more tips, tricks, and guidance for everything beekeeping.