What's Wrong With My Beehive - Varroa Infested Colony - Varroa Damage - Varroa Bomb

Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. Today I'm going to show you 3 colonies that are really suffering badly from varroa damage. Now, these aren't my colonies, these are the 3 colonies that I inherited from the deceased beekeeper. So I inherited them in September 2019, It's about 7 or 8 months ago now. They've not been treated in that time. I chose not to treat them because I wanted to see how well they were going to perform without being treated. To my knowledge, they hadn't been treated the previous year, so the last time that they were treated was potentially around September 2018. So it was almost a bit of an experiment to see, can these colonies survive without being treated? will they be able to kind of manage with such an influx of varroa? So I see loads of beekeepers who do this and they say that it's absolutely fine, they don't treat, they get loads of honey, they've got healthy bees, and I have to say I've always been a little bit suspicious of these claims. So I just wanted to try it out for myself, and that's not to say that anybody who does this is wrong or that they're lying, and I'm sure that some local strains do adapt to varroa damage and can cope with it well. These 3 colonies certainly haven't. So all we know is for a minimum of 9 months, that's all I'm confirmed about, they have not been treated for varroa. I suspect it's probably longer than that, maybe 18 to 24 months. But when you see these colonies, you will see that they are really, really suffering. I can guarantee these guys will not get through the winter if left without a treatment. So I had left them for the time being. I'd taken a few splits off them earlier in the year, made up some nucs, given them new queens, and those nucs have performed really, really well because they've been given a new queen and they're thriving. They've had a brood break as well, so you can kind of do non-chemical varroa management on them. So kind of like pulling off drone brood and doing brood breaks and various things like that. Whether they work again, we're not sure, but we know disrupting that brood cycle does have a really, really big impact on the amount of varroa within the colony. So the nucs have been all right, but I came back to these colonies 2 days ago and I was expecting to see really big, strong colonies. When I left them, they were on about 4 or 5 frames of brood and they had a bit of some stores up in the supers as well. And that was 6 weeks ago. So I was coming back expecting to see the brood box completely full, and I was going to put another super on. This is, this is kind of what I was thinking. And I came and they've dwindled, they've gone backwards. So there's still a queen in there, she's still mated, so it's still the same queen, she's marked. But the colonies are in such a bad way. So there's kind of, there's open brood, there's visible varroa, there's deformed wing virus. That it's the lack of expansion that is my biggest concern, and that for me is the biggest indicator that there's something really, really wrong. Bees expand at this time of the year, you know what I mean? Throughout the spring months, you see rapid expansion in your bees. If you're not seeing that, then there's something wrong, and a lot of the time it can be due to varroa damage. So all we're going to do in this video is I'm just going to show you the colonies. We're going to do a subsequent video on showing you how I deal with the colonies, but this video is just showing you the varroa damage, what to look out for, and see if you can identify it within your own colonies. So I'll get my hood on and we'll go and take a look. Right, so we're back at the deceased beekeeper's apiary now, and I'm just going to go through these colonies and show you the signs of varroa infestation. So like I said, when I came back, I was expecting to see this brood box absolutely jam-packed full of brood. I was expecting to see honey in my, my brood box, which is effectively a super. And you've got your queen excluder there. What I found is pretty sad, to be honest. Like, they've really, really gone backwards. So we need to take some positive action today to remedy that. And I think I'll move away from experimenting with colonies going forward, and we'll get these guys a nice treatment, try and kind of remedy the situation. So first thing I noticed with this colony was how light the box was. There's literally nothing to it. I would expect to see A cluster of bees around this big— I mean, this colony was over 4 frames before, and it's just gone backwards. That means that the bees that are emerging are not enough to sustain that kind of evolution of the colony. They're barely treading water. In fact, they're trying to tread water and they're sinking. So that was the first indication to me, the lack of any kind of expansion within this brood nest here. So this is always going to be really, really difficult to show you on camera, but I can see the varroa mites. Like, I can see them just walking around on the brood. Like, it doesn't take a genius to work out this colony's got a problem. Okay, if you see the one odd mite, it might not be an issue, but I've just opened it up and I've seen mites straight away, so we know there's a problem. So a mite has just gone in there and you can see it. Can you see it there walking around trying to find a nice little emerging brood to go into? Just freely walking around. You see this bee here? Really bad deformed wing virus. In fact, terrible deformed wing virus. Not just a little bit of gnawing. That is effectively a useless bee. It can't fly. What you've also got is a lot of Uncapping on the cells, so you've got like little holes here. That's a really, really sure sign that there's varroa in there. It's either varroa burrowing in, as it probably is in this instance here, trying to get inside where there's so many of them, or it's the bees trying to kind of clean them out at the same time, which is a good habit, but it's clearly not enough to support this colony. So as you can see, We've got real, real issues with this colony. We've got capped brood with holes in, we've got visible varroa mites, and we've got deformed wing virus. I don't need to go any further than that. This colony is in a terrible state and it needs treatment. I don't think anybody would disagree with me that this colony, if left to go through winter, considering it's kind of basically the 1st of July now, will not survive. There is no possible way this colony can survive. Because for the last 2 months it's dwindled, it's gone backwards. It needs to get to a point where it's healthy, it's expanding, it's got sufficient stores to get through winter, and unless we take a positive action, that's just not going to happen. Now, I don't, I don't know if you remember this colony before. They were pretty horrible. They were flying up at me, they were aggressive. It's because they had enough bees to do that. Now the bees are so badly deformed due to the virus, they can't even fly at me. Now again, you've got these little pinprick holes on the capped brood. That's a classic sign. You've got ones that are not even being closed up properly there. Lots of holes in the brood. Another hole there. More visible mites. Just gone away. I won't go into any further detail on that. It's quite clear this colony's in trouble. So we're going to put it back together again and we're going to treat it. But before we do that, we need to make sure there's a few things in place. So I want to identify the queen. I want to see the queen. I want to see eggs. And that means that we've got the beginnings of a colony. We've got something that's worth saving. If there was no queen and these were, say, a laying worker colony, I just close them up. I just close them up. I wouldn't even shake them out, 'cause shaking them out creates what's called a varroa bomb, and they're going to bring that varroa to neighbouring colonies. Like at the moment, this is a bit of a disease risk, this apiary, and I'm not overly happy about it. So I'm going to have to treat in situ here and not move these colonies anywhere until they're healthy. So we're going to have to do a reactive treatment to try and get these colonies into a better state. So there's the queen, marked red. So 2018 queen, still plodding on. She's still laying eggs. So I don't think there's anything wrong with the queen, although there is a bit of chalkbrood in this colony as well. So I'm going to treat them, see if that can clear the chalkbrood up, because I think when colonies get bigger, they get more prolific and they get better at cleaning out those mummies, which means that the virus, that bacterial infection, doesn't spread amongst the brood. So I've done the check on this colony. We've got eggs, worker brood, we've got a queen, so it's safe to go ahead and treat. Now I'll be treating all of my colonies kind of first week of August, middle of August, with Apivar, and we'll do a different separate video with Apivar. Now Apivar means— Apivar is a treatment that means that you can't have the supers on at the same time, so you can never use Apivar within the season. But you can feed with Apivar. So what I do is I get to the end of the season, take all of my honey off, put the feeders on, put the Apivar on, and leave it on between 6 to 10 weeks depending on the treatments that I'm doing at the time. Obviously we can't do that with this colony here. They've got honey supers on at the moment. I've got honey supers on them at the time and there is a little bit of honey in there, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to leave the honey supers on and I'm going to use a treatment that is safe for leaving honey supers on. And there is only one treatment that you can use for that, and that is Max. At this time of year, that's the treatment that you need to use. So we're going to call it a day for this video, and we're going to move on to the next video, which is how to use Max. So thanks for watching this video. Please tune into the next one to see how we go ahead and treat this colony. I hope you've enjoyed it. Please hit the subscribe button. Please hit the bell so you're notified of every video, and I'll see you next time. Shh.