🐝 Sublimating Oxalic Acid To Knock Down Varroa

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 apply apibioxal using a Sublimox. So first thing I want to say is, if you enjoy watching our channel, please hit the subscribe button in the right-hand corner, hit the bell so you're notified of every single video that we do. We post videos twice a week, once on a Wednesday and once on a Friday, and we cover a wide range of beekeeping topics, so there's something for everyone. So on to this video, ApiBioxal. Now, ApiBioxal is the trade name for oxalic acid, and unfortunately it's not nice clean 99.6% pure oxalic acid. It's got glucose in it as well, but unfortunately, if you want to be above the law, and use a recognized medicine in the UK, you need to use apibioxal. It's the only approved oxalic-based treatment that you can use in your Sublimox or Varox or Gasvap. It's the only one, so don't use any other one. Apibioxal is the one to use. Now unfortunately, it's nowhere near as good as pure oxalic acid, and it does gum up the Sublimox and the other sublimation devices. So in an ideal world, you'd use oxalic acid, but unfortunately it is illegal, so you do need to use apibioxal. Now, if you haven't seen them already, here's a couple of links to my previous videos, one reviewing the Sublimox and one reviewing the Gasvap. I actually did 2 videos reviewing the Gasvap, one of the previous version and one of the new version, and every time I get to this point of the year and I need to do some oxalic acid sublimation using apibioxal, I always end up using the Sublimox. Like, as much as I really want to use the gas vat, I prefer the Sublimox. I just find it a lot more reliable doing a number of colonies. So this is what I'm going to use in this video. For people who aren't aware of what the Sublimox is, it's literally a kind of heating pan that fires oxalic acid sublimate out of this copper tube here. Comes with these containers here, so what you do is you put your oxalic acid in there, you invert your Sublimox once it's on and heated to the correct temperature, and then you turn it upside down and it fires out oxalic acid sublimate. Oxalic acid is a really, really good treatment to use to kill phoretic mites in your beehive, so it really, really does kind of cause havoc with the varroa mite cycle. And you get pretty much immediate drops from using oxalic acid. It does only affect the phoretic mites though. So a phoretic mite is one that kind of lives on the bee and one that isn't capped within brood. So oxalic acid will do nothing to mites that aren't phoretic. So any mites that are within the brood, it will not touch them. So it does need repeated cycles to be effective. And it also needs to follow a quite strict timeline. In order to be effective as well. So that timeline is 5 days. So what you need to do is repeated cycles over a 5-day period in order for the treatment to be effective. People talk of kind of like 3 or 4 treatments as being an average, but it can go kind of anywhere up to 6 or 7 really, if you want to get that mite level down to absolutely nothing. It's a good treatment to use when you're broodless, so perfect kind of like around Christmas or New Year. At the point of the season where there's the least amount of brood possible, especially capped brood. So if you do it around Christmas or New Year, you can probably get away with one treatment and you'll get a really, really good drop. If you're doing it as your sole autumn treatment, you need to do a number of blasts. I would recommend 4 as an absolute minimum, and you want to do it at 5-day intervals. So that means you want to do a treatment, wait 5 days, do another treatment, wait 5 days, do another treatment, and so on and so on. Until you see that mite drop coming down drastically. So it's always a good idea to put your monitoring boards in before you do this treatment. You want to close up that space as best as you possibly can in order to keep all of that sublimate within the hive for as long as possible. And then what's going to happen is the gas that is formed when you sublimate oxalic acid condenses on the bodies of the bees and on the body of the mites, and that's what causes the real drastic drop in varroa. So in this video, I've tried doing it with a mic on and it is just impossible. I've got a big mask that I need to wear and I've got a generator on, so you literally cannot hear me. So all I'm going to do is I'm going to talk you through the process and we're just going to have the video playing in the background on silent. It's going to be the easiest way for me to talk you through exactly what's going on, right? So before we get into the video and start sublimating some oxalic acid, apibioxal, Final word of warning is make sure you wear proper PPE. Really, really need to be careful. Oxalic acid is horrible stuff. You don't want to get it on your hands, so wear the correct gloves. Don't want to get it anywhere on your body, in your eyes, in any cuts. It really stings. But especially, you do not want to breathe it in or ingest it in any way whatsoever. So you need to use a full face mask, preferably, and one with filters that are approved for organic respiration, so it will filter out kind of organic particles. Most of the painting masks are like that, but if you look at it for a 3M one that's registered against organic particulate matter, that's the one that you want to get. And as you can see, it's probably going to be really, really difficult just to hear me with the mask on. You'd have to listen to me breathing through it as well, which is quite annoying. But then the fact that I use a generator, you literally won't be able to hear a thing. So we'll do the video without the mask on and I'll just talk you through the process. It's going to be a lot easier that way and you'll learn a lot more. Right, so what you need to do is you need to get the generator up and running. So get your generator on, get it producing electricity. You then want to put your Sublimox in and just plug it in. And remember, this is 240 volts, so you don't really want to be working when it's raining Do this on a nice dry cool evening is best. You want to try and get as many bees as you possibly can to be within the hive, but it's not the end of the world. Like, I don't have time to do all of this in the evening, so I do it when they're actively flying, and I'm doing it as a combination with another treatment as well. So I'm doing Apivar as my main treatment, and then I'm just giving them a bit of immediate varroa relief by using the Sublimox. So it's not as important as it potentially seems. And then what you need to do is you need to block off as many of the ventilation holes as you have in your colony as you possibly can. So if you've got an inspection board or an inspection tray, you want to put that in and block off any mesh floor at the bottom. And then you need to work out where you're going to enter with your nozzle. So the GasVap has one of these as well, and the Sublimox has one. It's just a small little copper pipe. Like that, and you need to work out where you're going to enter your beehive with this pipe. Now there's numerous ways of doing this. You can just block off the OMF floor and then poke the little nozzle through the entrance. That works okay, but you're probably not going to get the dispersion of the OA as well as you might. Another way of doing it is to kind of build a custom-built floor, and then you can enter in from the bottom. And then there's my favorite way, which is to have a top eek, and then you go in from the top. I find the dispersion by doing it from the top is far superior, and it means that you don't actually have to do the blocking off. Isn't as important as if you were going to come in from the bottom, because that oxalic acid vapor has got to work all the way down before it can release out of the mesh floor. So that's my preferred method, is you can use an eek with a hole in it. Or you can use one of the multi-purpose crown boards. That's what I use because they've got the holes in place. And then once you've kind of worked out where you're going to go from, the rest of it's really, really simple. So we'll get the video up now and I'll show you exactly how I do it. So you want to approach your hive, and like I say, choose a good time to do this, either early morning or late in the evening. Don't do it when it's raining though. And then you need to take your roof off, and if you've got any feeders on there as well, Take your feeders off. You just want to get the colony nice and open, and then you want to take your crown board or your eke, and then you want to put that on top of the colony and make sure that you line up all of the holes or the entrances in the same way, just so you're not kind of going from front to back. I've done this video purposely one at the front, one at the back, so you can see it from different angles. But when I do a big run of them, I have them all at the back just so I can kind of go from colony to colony and give it the So then, once you've put the crown board on the top, you need to wait for your sublimox to go to the green light. Now, the green light is telling you that the sublimox has reached the correct temperature to enable the correct sublimation of oxalic acid. This is really important. You don't want to do it on an orange light because it won't sublimate the oxalic acid properly. Now, this is different from the Varox. So the Varox is a tray type. Sublimation device, and what you need to do with that each time is you need to reset it in cold water in order to not early sublimate. The Sublimox is a great device because it basically gets up to temperature and then it holds that temperature for you, and you're basically just tipping the oxalic acid in each time and it fires it out, and then you can just tip another one in and it fires it out. So it's really, really quick. It's probably 20 or 30 seconds per hive. And that's all it takes, whereas the Varox was kind of five or six minutes per hive. Really, really didn't like the Varox. So it's just worth saying as well in this video, jumping in this this advice, it's interchangeable. So the GasVap and the Sublimox work exactly the same way, and you can use the advice in this video interchangeably between the two. I just prefer the Sublimox because I find it a little bit more consistent in terms of results. So once you've got your colony set up, you've got your inspection board in, you've got your eek. On the top. If you've got any ventilation holes in that eke, just pop the feeder on top or pop the roof on top. The idea is to create as sealed an environment as you possibly can. You don't want the sublimate to escape. So then all you need to do is you take your Sublimox, you take a measured dose of apibioxal, and I always just fill that to the rim. I don't bother weighing it, I just fill that up completely to the surface. And then you want to invert your Sublimox like this, put that in, the rubber ring will hold it in place, and then you place that into the hive and then you invert. Basically, the oxalic acid out there will drop into the hot pan and it will fire out oxalic acid sublimate. Leave that in the hive for 20 or 30 seconds, and then when you take it out, you won't see much coming out because it would have all fired into the hive. Now, once it's fired into the hive, you'll see that any kind of little nooks or crannies or gaps, the oxalic acid will creep out of. But don't worry about that, enough of it's going to remain within the hive. And then the best practice is, if you've got multiple crown boards or ekes, is to set up a whole run of these and leave them on for as long as you possibly can. So when I go out, I do runs of 10, so I put 10 crown boards on, get the colonies prepared, get the inspection trays in, and then I blast them all, 10 blasts, give it a couple of minutes, and then I'll move them one by one, starting on the one that I blasted first, and set up the next 10 colonies. And then that gives the colony a really, really good time to kind of make sure that all of that oxalic acid sublimate actually settles on the bees, on the varroa mites, to do the damage and kill the phoretic mites on the bees. And it's as simple as that. Like, it's a really, really easy treatment, but it does have some quite kind of significant health risks. So make sure you do use the correct PPE when you're doing it. It's not nice to get this stuff in your lungs. If you get any of it in, you can feel it straight away. Really, really not nice stuff. So make sure you take all adequate precautions on it. Also, make sure you follow the guidelines in terms of the schedule. You need to make sure that you're doing it at 5-day intervals. Anything longer than 5 days and you're not working with the varroa's life cycle. So basically, you can have varroa that's capped in brood, and you do the first blast and you miss it. And then if you were to come back in 7 days, the new varroa could have hatched out by then and gone back down into new brood, and then you miss them again. But by doing it every 5 days, you're working with that cycle, and it means that each time you're hitting new varroa and killing them. As opposed to the same varroa being tucked away in the brood where you can't access them by killing them with the sublimate. So it's really, really crucial if you're going to do multiple sublimations, do it at 5 days apart. And if you're going to do it as your sole autumn treatment, make sure you do a minimum of 4 vapes. So 4 vapes at 5 days apart, that should give you a really, really good drop. Make sure the inspection tray is in, and then you can monitor the drop that you're going to get on your mites as well. And that's about it. Like, it's a really simple treatment, really, really effective treatment. Make sure you're using apibioxal, not the pure, much easier, much cheaper oxalic acid. That's the only approved one for use in the UK, so make sure you use that. And that's it for the video. It's a simple one, it's a quick one, but it's one to keep your bees really, really healthy both throughout the season when the supers aren't on Into the autumn and then over the winter as well. Really, really good way to get excellent drops of varroa mites. So I hope you've enjoyed the video. As always, please hit the subscribe button, please hit the bell so you're notified of every single video we do, and I'll see you next time.