Winter Varroa Treatment – Avoid This Mistake and Protect Your Bees
Laurence Edwards warns beekeepers not to harvest honey into late fall, as varroa mites explode in summer and devastate winter bees when brood declines. Stop harvesting by mid-August, treat with Apivar for 6-8 weeks, then Apibioxal when broodless. One or two extra supers aren't worth losing your colony.
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2024 has been the worst season for honey in living memory. Don't make this mistake and make 2025 just as bad. So 2024 was rainy and windy and damp and cold and miserable, and I kind of just want to forget about 2024 in terms of a honey crop. It was shocking. But what I see a lot of people talking about at the moment was, I didn't get a spring crop. My summer crop is substandard. I'm gonna push the bees out as far as I possibly can. Maybe we'll get a decent Himalayan balsam crop, and I'm relying on maybe going and getting some heather as well. Now, I understand the logic in that, in that you're relying maybe on a honey crop. You want some honey for your customers, so you're just gonna extend that honey season as long as you possibly can. Now, I've been in that situation many, many times over. A number of years I've done that. I've said, well, I'm just going to keep on going. I'm not going to take the supers off at the end of August. I'm not going to take the supers off in the middle of September. I'm just going to go through to the end of September, early October to take my supers off because the Himalayan balsam is still flowing and it's nice and warm. Let's extend the season as much as we possibly can. I think that strategy is setting you up for a terrible, terrible year in 2025. Now, I previously got this advice from Richard, who is my mentor, and And Richard's been keeping bees for 30 years. Richard's seen it all. He knows pretty much everything there is to know about beekeeping, and he has made every single mistake there is to make in beekeeping as well. But the problem with extending your honey season out so far is that there is no viable treatment that's available to you to treat for varroa when you really need to be treating for varroa. As the bees are building up in the spring, they respond to the lengthening days, and the amount of brood in the colony, such as the one behind me here, calm Buckfast bees from Black Mountain Honey, I might add, increases the brood nest as those days get longer. As the brood nest increases, the varroa in the colony increases. So a little varroa will walk along, fertile varroa, drop down into one of the cells, lays between 3 and 5 eggs, and the first egg that hatches is a male. The subsequent eggs that hatch are female, and then the males and females mate inside the cell so that when the cell is uncapped, you get 3 to 4 females that come out and they waddle off and do the same thing. So you can see how that formula works. The more brood, the more varroa. But not just 1 to 1, it's kind of like 1 to 3 or 1 to 4. So as you're increasing the amount of brood that's in the colony, you're increasing the varroa by 3 or 4-fold. Now, as long as there's sufficient bees in the colony to manage that varroa, and they're going to constantly be cleaning themselves, and they can tolerate it to a certain point. But as you get through to the summer solstice, that triggers to the queen that she needs to stop laying as much. The nest starts to contract. And then after 3 to 4 weeks, you see a rapid decline in the number of bees that are in the colony, but you've still got the same amount of varroa that are in there. So you get this overlap, and you generally get this overlap around mid to end of August or early September, where proportionally there is way more varroa per bee in the colony than there was early on in the season. Now, where you're coming to at that point in the year also is a very important part of the year where the bees are getting prepared, but the queen is getting prepared to lay up the winter bees. Now the winter bees are slightly different, they're slightly different size, they've got a very, very different job to the bees that you can see coming in and out of this really nice calm colony here in the background. All they need to do is keep the queen warm, keep the cluster warm, and stay fit and healthy and live for as long as possible. When the winter bees are being created, you want the viral load on the colony to be as low as it can possibly Now if you extend out your honey season into September, end of September, even into October, you're overlapping the honey season with the beginning of that part where the bees are creating the winter bees. You've not done any treatment, and because you've got that disproportionate amount of varroa to bees, the viral load couldn't be any higher. You have just given your winter bees the worst possible start that you could get going into the winter. Now, how does that manifest itself? What that means is that the bees going through the winter have the higher viral load and they will not live anywhere near as long. What that means for you is that come the spring, you've got nowhere near as many bees left in your colony, which means that the queen can't lay anywhere near as much brood to get the colony started again in the spring. So by stealing that little bit of extra honey from the bees in 2024, you are setting your bees up for really bad failure in 2025. You're setting yourself up for significant overwintered losses as a result of this high viral load. I've made the mistake. I've made the mistake on numerous years, and I never make the mistake anymore. So what I do is, regardless of how much honey I've got up until this point, I go in middle of August, I take off all of my honey crop, I put my feeders on, I give my bees a really good feed, I put my Apivar strips in, or my Amitraz strips, or my Apitraz strips, which are all basically exactly the same thing. It's just Amatraz. It's a miticide, and I leave the bees to it. They can have the Himalayan balsam, they can have the ivy, they can have the rest of the bramble if there's any clover left over. They can set themselves up in the configuration that they want to be set up for in winter. The winter bees get the best possible start because by the time they start to raise the winter bees, the Apivar strips should have been in between 6 to 8 weeks. And then what I do is when I come and take the Apivar strips out, I give it a couple of weeks of them being out, and then I treat them with apibioxal at a point when I'm hoping that the colony here is broodless. That ensures that I'm getting a really good drop for the phoretic mites late on in the season as well. I'm giving my bees the best chance to thrive in 2025. If you extend your season by 4 to 6 weeks, so instead of going in on the 15th of August you go in on the 30th of September, what are you likely to achieve? Maybe an extra super of honey, at the very best 2 supers of honey, and I would say that is probably pushing it. You might get nothing, you might get zero honey because the weather might just not play ball anyway. I can guarantee that if the weather conditions are right in 2025, if you extend the 2024 season, you'll lose that honey in 2025 because of the health of the bees coming through the winter, coming out of the spring. They're not going to be able to keep up with the colonies that have overwintered well and have been treated well. As I said, I've made the mistake many times. You are free to do what you like with your bees, but this is what I would recommend. 15th of August or there or thereabouts, get your Apivar treatments in, feed the bees, let them set up for winter, plan for 2025.
