Laurence Edwards shows how to treat varroa mites in long hives using Apivar strips. Use one strip per five frames of brood, space them three frames apart, and leave them in for exactly eight weeks. Treat all colonies at once to prevent reinfestation, and combine treatment with autumn feeding in one visit.
Today I'm going to show you how to treat your long hive colony for varroa mites. Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. In this video, it's going to be a really nice, quick, straightforward video. I'm just going to show you my method for treating the colony for varroa mites in the Hyde Hives long hive. Now, the treatment that I've chosen for all of my colonies this year, and it's an important note to start, when you are treating colonies in an apiary, regardless of what treatment you're using, make sure that treat all of the colonies at once. You need to make sure that you're bringing down the level of varroa across the whole of the apiary. Don't just treat one or two because then they can get reinfested by other ones, so make sure you treat everything all at once. The treatment I'm using this year though is Apivar, and I really do like Apivar. You need to make sure that you don't leave it in for too long so the colonies don't build up resistance to it, but it is by far and away the easiest treatment in the world, and that's what we're going to cover in this video. So I'll get my bee suit on, I'll get into the colonies, and I'll show you how to treat your colonies in a long hive Varroa mites. Right, so let's get in. Treat the colonies in the long hives for varroa mites using Apivar. So this is what Apivar looks like, comes in 2 strips like that. You peel them apart and then you want to use 1 strip per 5 frames of national brood. Now in here I've got 14 by 12 frames and they're over about 7 or 8 frames of brood. Little bit of a mixture, some are slightly different, so just use rough maths to work out how how many frames you're going to need. And what you need to do is you need to pin them in the most active part of the hive where the most amount of brood is. Keep them separated by at least 3 frames and alternate them in terms of sides closest to one or the other. Basically, you don't want them right next to each other, you don't want them at exterior ends of the hive, you want them in the business area where all the brood is, and you're just going to hang them in between the frames. These need to stay in for eight weeks. Really, really careful with that. If you do it not long enough, you don't get a good varroa drop. You'll have issues with varroa, and if you leave it longer, you have issues in terms of longer-term issues with your colony becoming resistant to mites and resistant to the treatment. So let's get inside. I'll show you how to pop the strips in to kill varroa mites using Apivar in a long hive. So here's my colony. Nice big strong colony over about. 15 or 16 frames of bees, but I've been in there and there's only about 7 frames of brood. The brood is over towards the entrance side, so I'm just going to stick the 2 Apivar strips in, in between those frames of brood, and I'm going to leave them in there for 8 weeks. So there you go, there's my Apivar strips in between frames 1 and 2 and frames 4 and 5, alternate sides of the beehive. The bees don't like Apivar, so they will start trying to attack it, They'll get used to that though, but it works by the fact that it's got Amitraz embedded in the plastic, works its way onto the bees, they transfer that round the hive, and then that is what kills the varroa mites. Simple as that though. You can pop a little toothpick in if you want, but I find that they work just as well like this. If you want to go belt and braces though, use the toothpick, dangle them down a little bit lower, but I find this works and gives you a really good long-term varroa drop. So there we go, I've closed it all back up again. I can leave these for 8 weeks now and then I need to come in and remove those strips. The beauty of Apivar though is that you can feed your colony at the same time, so I'm going to do a separate video on that showing you how to get your feeders set up on the Hyde Hives long hives, but this is my method. Take out your honey, get your Apivar in, get your feeders on, get your colonies ready for winter. And there we go, it's Simple as that. I really do like my long hive because it just makes everything easy. There's no heavy lifting. You can just get straight in there, do whatever you need to do. And I also do really like Apivar as my treatment because it's just so quick, and you get the benefit that you can feed at the same time, which means that you're not duplicating visits to the apiary. And it also means that the queen doesn't go off lay while you're feeding, so you get that boost in bees as well. I just find the combination of feeding light syrup. early August and treating with Apivar, come September, end of September, beginning of October, you've got big strong colonies that you can just backfill with loads of 2:1 syrup. Hope you enjoyed that video though. I hope you found it useful. As always, please hit the subscribe button, please hit the bell so you're notified of every video, and I'll see you next time.
