🐝 When To Vape Bees With Oxalic Acid - Timing Is Everything
Laurence Edwards explains when to vape bees with oxalic acid for Varroa mites. Oxalic acid only kills mites on adult bees, not inside capped brood, so timing matters: treat during the broodless window in early December when temperatures hit 9-13°C. A single well-timed treatment works if bees stay clustered and fully exposed to vapor.
Chapters
Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. Today I'm going to tell you when and the best conditions to do oxalic acid vaping to get the best mite drop. So it's really important to do the oxalic acid sublimation at the correct time of the year. The time that you're trying to do it is when the colony is broodless. So oxalic acid sublimation, it kills the varroa mites through a mechanical action, but it can only kill the phoretic mites on the bees. So what that means is if you've got bees in your colony, they've got mites on them, oxalic acid sublimation will kill those phoretic mites. What it will not kill is any mite that is capped within any sort of brood. So where I say a Max system, a formic acid treatment, will get inside that brood and kill those varroa, Oxalic acid sublimation doesn't do that. So in order to make the treatment as effective as it possibly can be, you need to make sure that you're doing numerous treatments. You do those treatments at 5 days apart to give you the best chance of killing as many varroa as possible because you're aligning it with their reproduction cycle. However, in winter, we try and limit it to one single treatment with oxalic acid sublimation, and we try and do that when the colony is broodless. The only way to be really sure that your colony is broodless is picking out all of the frames, shaking off the bees, and looking to see whether there's any eggs. Now, do not do that. That is the worst possible thing that you can do, but it's the only surefire way to tell whether the colony is broodless. What I would suggest is just going for a rough timing of the year. Now, in the UK, you want to make sure that you're doing this around early December. I know historically people have said that it needs to be In between Christmas and New Year, and that's a good time. And it's not the end of the world doing it then, but I would highly recommend doing it early December. You'll definitely, definitely want to do it before the winter equinox, so before December the 21st, as the bees start to realize that the days are a little bit longer, and that can trigger brood rearing. And as soon as that brood rearing is triggered, then you've got into real issues, and the mite drop is going to be significantly lower, As if you hit them at a broodless period. Now, don't just blindly think it's the first or second week of December, I'm going to go out and vape my bees. The next really important critical step is getting the correct temperature. Now, the reason that the bees aren't creating brood at this time of the year is because it's cold. There's no forage out for them, there's no nectar, there's no pollen. They cluster up around that queen, try and hunker down and get through the cold months of the year, So that they can make a bounty of honey in the spring and the summer. What you're looking for when you're vaping your bees, so you're sublimating oxalic acid, is the period when they're broodless and the period when it's around 9 or 10 degrees. You want it as warm as it can possibly be without the bees flying. So if you can get that temperature right, and it is different and it does depend on where you are, but what you're looking for is the highest temperature possible with the bees not flying, and the reason for that is twofold. The first one is if the bees are flying, then you're going to miss all of the bees that are out, and they're going to come back into the colony, and they might get a bit of oxalic acid rubbed on them, but it's not going to be as effective as if they get a full dose when they're in the colony. The reason that you want it as warm as possible is that as it gets colder, the bees contract, contract, contract to try and stay warm, and it means that the surface area of available for that sublimite to come and hit them is reduced. So what you're looking for is a really nice loose cluster. You'll get a few bees flying up at you, maybe. You want to keep them, as many as you possibly can, within the hive and the warmest possible temperature. So I'm not going to go any further than that in this video. When you're vaping your colonies to get the best mite drop, you're looking for 2 things. You want a broodless colony. You can't check But you can try and get them at the best time of the year. And the next thing is you want it as warm as it can possibly be without the bees leaving their hive. If you can tick both of those criteria, you can get away with one oxalic acid vape around early December, and that's going to give you such a good mite drop. That's what I do on all of my colonies. I get away with one treatment because I time it for when they're broodless, and I do it on a warm day. So look behind me today. Today is not the day to be doing oxalic acid treatments. I had earmarked this as a good day, and I woke up this morning and it was absolutely freezing and it was snowing, and up here on this high apiary, it's just far too cold. So I've abandoned my vaping for today, and I'm doing a few videos to tell you what not to do. If you were to vape today, you would get a drop of varroa mites because you get all of the external bees on that cluster The further you get into the cluster, the more protection they've got from that sublimate, and the less exposure the varroa mite is going to get to the vaping that you're doing. You want to make things as efficient as possible. You don't want to be coming in and doing numerous vapes again and again and again if you can get away with one. So my advice for people in the UK, first or second week of December at the latest. You can even do this though back end of November. I would say any time from 1st of November through to maybe the 15th of December, that is a prime period for vaping in the UK. Depends where you are, further south, further north, but somewhere in that period you're more than likely to be broodless. If you leave it until January, you're not going to be broodless, you're going to have brood in pretty much all of your colonies. You're going to vape them, you'll get a mite drop, but it won't be anywhere near as good as if you do it earlier in the year. But just take that advice on board as well. It needs to be the correct temperature, as warm as it can possibly be without the bees flying. If you've got to choose between the two though, and you've got a warm 12 or 13 degree day, say in November, versus a 1 or 2 degree day in January or December, go for the warmer day and do it in the evening because the bees will fly back and they'll fly back early. All you need to do is block them up in the evening and And then you can go in there and vape them. So on a warm day, you can work around it a little bit. It's difficult if you're trying to do 50 or 60 colonies because you can't do all of that in the evening. Make sure that you're getting the temperature correct as opposed to making sure that the bees aren't flying. So don't wait and wait and wait for the perfect day when it's 10.5 degrees and the bees just about want to leave the door, but then they don't. It's better to do it at 12 or 13 degrees Nice big loose cluster, bees flying all over the place. You can seal them in in the evening, give them a really good, nice strong vape, and you'll get excellent vape drops. So that's it for the video. I hope you've enjoyed it. I hope you found it useful. Please hit the subscribe button. Please hit the bell so you're notified of every video, and I'll see you next time.
