The Secret Weapon Against Varroa Mites - How A Forced Brood Break Supercharges Oxalic Treatments

If you want an organic method for treating varroa, this video is for you. Now, the varroa mite is probably the most annoying part of beekeeping. They were introduced into the UK in 1992, and since then beekeepers have come up with a variety of methods of trying to tackle the problem of varroa mites and treating colonies to ensure that the viral load that the varroa carry doesn't impact the bees too much. There are hundreds of different methods of varroa control. There's chemical methods like amitraz or formic acid. You might see that as Max or Formic Pro or Apivar. And then there's some organic methods as well, such as ripping up rhubarb leaves and placing them in your beehives. That is not a good idea. It does not work. Planting thyme across your apiary. Again, that does not work. I've probably heard about 100 snake oil recipes for things that you can add to your beehives, and none of them are effective, I'm afraid. However, there is one organic method for treating bees for varroa that is highly effective, and that method is using oxalic acid. Now, oxalic acid is a naturally occurring chemical. You find it in loads of things. You find it in carob tree nectar and the honey, but in its purest form, you can mix it up with some sugar syrup and you can dribble it on your bees. You can sublimate it. That means turning it instantly from a solid into a gas. And you can even use towels that are impregnated with oxalic acid. The bees rip them up, chuck them outside the front of the hive, and spread that organic chemical throughout the hive, and it kills all of the phoretic mites. The phoretic mites, the mites that live on the bee, doesn't do anything to the mites that are in the brood. So if you're gonna go down this route of treating your bees with oxalic acid, the best way to get the highest efficacy to make that treatment really work well is to ensure that there is no brood in the colony. Now in the UK, there's often a natural brood break between the middle of November through to the middle of January. Depending on where you are in the UK, sometimes it's a 12-week brood break, sometimes it's a 1-week brood break. You kind of have to guess. And if you treat them when there isn't a proper brood break, you're only getting those phoretic mites and you're missing all of the reproductive mites that are capped under the brood. So in this video, we are gonna talk about trapping queens to enforce a brood break. Now I'm here in Italy. They treat 4 times with oxalic acid each season, and 2 of those times they trap the queen in what's called a Scalvini cage. I was calling it a Calvini cage for ages yesterday, and then Tommaso corrected me and said, no, no, no, it's Scalvini. What are you talking about? I'm learning so much in Italy. It's brilliant. However, by placing the queen Into one of these Scalvini cages, you are able to enforce a brood break at any point throughout the season. Now, the problem with using standard oxalic acid in the UK is that it is not permitted. So this video is only relevant to anybody who is able to use oxalic acid without any risk of persecution. In the UK, you have to use apibioxal. Really frustrating because apibioxal is just a really poor version of pure oxalic acid with loads of glucose and fillers and junk chucked in there, and it's probably about 1,000 times more expensive. So it's annoying we can't use oxalic acid, and if we could use oxalic acid, that's definitely what I would use because it's tons better. We use apibioxal because we like to play by the rules. Also, with the legislation that comes with apibioxal, it says that you cannot use it with supers on. So what I'm going to show you today is the methodology for treating your bees organically in the UK, enforcing a brood break at the right time of the year, and treating your bees without putting the supers on. This works really, really well. So this is the system. Starting off the year with a single brood box. As your bees expand, you put your queen excluder on, maybe put one super on, the bees fill it with honey. You put 2 supers on, the bees fill it with honey. Maybe you get to 3 or 4 supers for spring. Really nice honey harvest there. And then within the UK, you have a natural forage break called the June gap. Now, it's a little bit of a misnomer, that, because sometimes the June gap comes in May. But in the UK, you generally do get this forage gap. It can be 3 days, it can be a week, it could be 10 days, and it generally hits around the back end of May or early June, depending on where you are in the UK. What I suggest you do at that point is you harvest So if you're on a single brood box configuration, you've got 3 or 4 supers on, the first thing that you're going to need to do is take an empty brood box, place some foundation or some drawn comb in it, and place that either underneath the existing brood box or on top of the existing brood box. Do that manipulation at the exact same time that you take your honey supers off. So your hive will look like this: brood box, queen excluder, 4 supers. You take away those 4 supers and you place that new brood box in. Now here's the clever part. Let's rewind a little bit. You need to have a punt as to where that June gap is gonna be. And it doesn't matter if you don't get this exactly right. If you're a few days out or a week out, the only downside is that you might lose a little bit of honey. But 10 days before you think that June gap is going to hit, what you do is you take your queen, you buy yourself a Scalvini cage, you plug it into the frame, you pick up your queen, you put her into the cage, You only do this on really nice, big, strong, healthy colonies. But on anything from average and above, you take the queen, put it in the cage 10 days before you're gonna harvest your honey. You come back after 10 days, you take the honey away, you put the additional brood box in. All of the forager bees that are out in the supers are gonna come back into that double brood box configuration. And for a very short period, whilst that queen is still caged, that entire colony of bees is now going to be broodless. So this is the system that you need to do. Identify when your June gap is. 3 weeks before you think the first day of the June gap arrives, you take your queen and you place her into the Scalvini cage. Now, Tommaso was just mentioning there, the Scalvini cage is far superior to any other cage, and it's superior for this reason. The queen can still lay inside that small square cage, but on a very small area. But the cage is so low down that the young nurse bees can't get in there and cap over the brood. So although when you go to treat, there might be some eggs, there might be some larvae, but everything is open, which means that the oxalic acid can penetrate into the cells and kill any varroa that are inside. So that's the system. 3 weeks before the June gap, you take your queen, place her in the Scalvini cage, close the cage up, leave the bees to continue foraging their honey. After 3 weeks, when that June gap comes, come back to your hive. You take all of your honey supers off, you place the additional brood box on immediately after. They need that additional brood box in order to have space just to keep the bees there. So you're moving from a single brood to a double brood system. You immediately treat with oxalic acid or apibioxal depending on where you are. You can dribble, you can sublimate, you can do whatever you like. There's no supers on, so you're ensuring that there's no contamination of honey supers with oxalic acid, even though it wouldn't contaminate them anyway, as many studies in the US have shown. But we do have to follow the rules. And also at that point, if there is a forage gap and there's not enough stores in the colony, you can feed your colony as well. A light 1:1 sugar syrup after that queen has been released from the cage will turbocharge your queen. The colony will draw out all of the foundation. They'll build up nice and strong. They won't starve because there's a lack of forage. The varroa load is instantly reduced to very, very low levels because you're targeting all of those phoretic mites and there's no mites that are sitting underneath capped brood. You allow the colony to grow back up again, and then as you move into the summer flows, you just start adding your supers back on. And hopefully with your very healthy bees now that have a much lower varroa level, will start to reduce that viral load down on the bees as you progress throughout the season. Now, if you don't want to continue with the double brood at this point, all you need to do is just remove the double brood box. Now, if you definitely don't want to go onto a double brood, you can do that system with a queen excluder on top, or you can just gamble and try and do it on a single brood. I don't like doing it on a single brood because the middle of the season is hard to feed them, but also you're likely to cause some congestion, and then causing congestion means that they're going to swarm. So I do like to switch from a single brood to a double brood at that point if I haven't already done the demaray. In beekeeping, there's a million and one different systems, and sometimes those systems aren't compatible with one another. This here is for a single brood system. that transforms into a double brood system during the June gap. I really, really like this system. You get lots of benefits from giving them additional space there. Feeding them sugar syrup turbocharges them. It ensures that the bees do not die after you've taken all of their honey off and they've got enough stores to get through the June gap. It means that as the bees progress towards the part in the season where varroa is going to cause the most damage, you've already knocked that varroa load right down. Complement that with a late season Amitraz treatment, middle of August after you've taken your summer crop, and then again complement that with a November-ish treatment, maybe November or December when there's A natural brood break and you sublimate some more apibioxal or oxalic acid and you will keep your bees in tip-top condition. Here in Italy, they treat 4 times with 2 enforced brood breaks and over thousands of hives that they have here, they have a winter mortality rate of less than 3%. I always say to people, if you can keep your mortality rate under 10%, you're doing really well. If you can keep it around 5%, you are probably one of the best beekeepers in the country. To keep it at 3% in a country where there is no natural brood break, you are doing so well. Very, very impressive. Wow, that was a lot of talking. Let's go and have a look at this Scalvini cage. We're going to pick a queen up. I'll show you what the cage looks like. I'll show you how to put that queen into the cage, and you will see just how good this process is. So as I came over here for Tommaso to show us the Scalvini cage and put the queen in, he made a very good point, and I completely got the dates wrong. 21 days is not long enough for the drone brood to emerge, and the majority of the varroa is going to be inside that drone brood. Always got to check those dates. So to be on the safe side, you need to cage that queen for around 26 days. 26 to 27 days. Drones generally emerge on day 24, but they sometimes do emerge on day 25, day 26. It's all dependent on the temperature. You do sometimes get delayed release of drone brood like that, so make sure you get the timings right. So Tommaso is going through this colony now. How nice and calm are these bees here? We're going to find that queen, we're going to put her in the cage and show you how it's done. Beautiful Continental Gold Star Lagustica queens. Look how calm they are. Love it. And of course, you know, we need to find the queen to show you this manipulation and we can't find her. This was happening loads yesterday and it was definitely all my fault, but we will find this queen. So in Italy, they have a Scalvini cage in every single brood box all the time. They don't take it out and they don't put it back in every time. It just lives inside the colony, which is nicer for the bees and nicer for the queen. It almost feels like quite natural for the queen to go into the cage because it smells of the colony already. Really good tip for you there. So what Tommaso was saying is with the Scalvini cage, it's an injection molded cage. cage, and if you know anything about injection molded plastic, the molds are incredibly expensive. When they first designed the cage, they got it wrong. The measurements were too high, which meant that when you put the queen in the cage, the benefit of the Scalvini cage is that she can still lay while she's in there. But because the cage was too high, it allowed the young nurse bees to come in and cap that brood. You can't have capped brood in a forced brood break. Completely defeats the point of it. So the newer model takes it down a little bit, and it's a much— and it's a little bit shallower, about 5 mm shallower, which restricts the young bees from coming in and capping over that brood. However, suppliers will still try and sell you the bigger version, so you need to say to them, I want the smaller version if you're going to do this, and don't let them trick you into the wrong model. Definitely doesn't work like that. How nice and calm are these bees? None of them flying up whatsoever. No gloves being used at all. But you know what, I'd definitely get away without using a veil with these bees. They are super calm. Right, The Scalvini cage, not the Calvini cage, the Scalvini cage, as you can see it there, lives in the center of the frame all the way through the year on these colonies. Let me put this frame down now and give you a real close look. So this is the Scalvini cage here. Injection molded plastic, fits directly on the brood frame like that. You will see we have an entrance for the queen there. You put the queen in, you take this little clip, push it in, and then you have to lock the cage. Really important that you lock the cage there because the bees can work their way open. Just a little latch over the top. But if you look inside, this is what makes the Scalvini cage unique. It has plastic moulded hexagon cells inside, which ensures that you keep the queen laying. Tommaso just pointed to it here. Found that queen lagustica. She was hiding on the roof. Look at that beautiful queen. We will be back to that queen and we will put her in here shortly. So the queen can go in there and she can lay into those cells. which ensures that you have a very low mortality rate. If the queen cannot lay when you cage her, if you did it in like a shipping cage or a wooden cage, you will lose a lot of those queens. And that is obviously not what you want. This isn't about killing queens. This is about killing varroa. So in order to put her inside, Tommaso is going to show us how to do that. Now, you remove the little entrance block like that. You pick up your queen, you just pop her in. She wanders in, you close it, and you ensure that that catch is on. And it is as simple as that. She'll just wander around in there. She'll lay her eggs. This is a queen that's Excluder, which means the queen can't get out, but young nurse bees can get in. So the queen will go through here, she'll lay all of the eggs. On day 4, those eggs will hatch out into larva, and then between day 4 and day 8, all of the worker bees will just clean that out because they realize they can't cap it over. In exceptional circumstances, you occasionally get bees that work out a system to cap that brood over. And speaking to Tommaso, he says in, in 1,000 colonies, you're talking about maybe 20 that do cap over a little bit of the brood in there. But you can see that would be very, very minimal compared to the brood across the whole colony there. What is so important with these Scalvini cages is that it keeps the queen in tip-top condition. The young bees still feed them royal jelly. She is still able to lay. There's no blockages at all. And then after you've gone through that process, after the colony's been treated with oxalic acid through dribbling or sublimation, all you need to do is just open up that cage and then you watch the queen just wander out Back onto the frame. So I've sat here for a few minutes. I don't think this queen's coming back out, but Tommaso just made a really good point. You don't open the cage and release the queen before you dribble. So you want to dribble while the queen is in the cage, which means you're not going to be dribbling your oxalic acid on the queen. Makes sense to do it that way around as opposed to releasing her and then treating. So there we go, an organic method of treating your bees for varroa using the Scalvini cage and enforcing a brood break. Highly effective, used across the world, and a really nice gentle system to keep your bees in the best health Do you have varroa in your country? Do you treat them in a different way? Stick it in the comments. I love to learn different systems for keeping my bees healthy.