One out of twenty hives:Heavy, very heavy mite drop.

[AR Beekeeper]

Ace, if you allow the colony to die, what are you going to replace it with?

Where do you think a colony's resistance comes from?  It doesn't spring up out of thin air, or out of a pile of dead bees.   

[beepro]

Van, I have another option for you without any type of a treatment.  Make another nuc hive by donating one frame of eggs/larvae from your choice of the tf hive.  This nuc hive will take all of your cap brood frames from this hive. 

The queen will remain in the same hive with all her foragers and nurse bees in the same location just without the cap brood frames.  All cap brood frames will be move to the new nuc hive. 

This queen will be mark as a treatment hive in the future since she cannot produce the mite fighting bees.  You don't have to kill this queen either.   Move her hive to the treatment yard later in the season.   You can even donate frame of bees from the tf hive if it is a bit weak.

By doing so the original queen will rebuild her brood nest with lesser mites with treatment as an option.  The new nuc hive will make themselves a new queen with the tf stock.  This will give them a brood break too.

I've clean up several nuc hives using this method starting in mid-May.  I already know by July they will be over run with mites if I don't do anything about it.  One hive is so clean now that I can give them a new mated queen to start a fresh.  So I gave them 2 mated queen and a virgin in the bottom box separated by 2 QEs.


For this to work, the new nuc hive must have all the cap broods emerged.  If the new queen start laying before then it will not work--cap brood mites issue.  To clean up the remaining free running mites off the original hive, give it one frame of open larvae about to be cap.  Then take it to the nuc hive after they're cap.

This is not a lot of work with one hive!  I can manage several deep nuc hives using this method without any chemical treatment.  Just labor and sweats.

To let a hive die because of no treatment is just inhumane almost like not giving medicine to a sick person.   I chose my method because it has been proven to work!

[Van, Arkansas, USA]

Beepro, this is good, very good, makes perfect sense.  Thanks for this post, Beepro, Ar and others.
Blessings

[Acebird]

Ace, if you allow the colony to die, what are you going to replace it with?

Survivors.  And out of those survivors only the ones that produce.
Insects multiply very rapidly.  Why waste your time with the ones that can't survive?  Why not focus your time and energy on the ones that can survive and produce what you want?

[beepro]

Van, out of 7 hives using my method of mite management, only 2 still have mites because the cap broods have not emerge entirely.  I plan
to introduce mated queen into these clean hive once the rest of the virgins are mated.   One trick that I use is to put mated queens into the
same hive separated by QEs at each box level.   This will hold the mated queens until all the cap broods have emerged from the mating nuc hives.

It is working now without the need to treat.   My bees know how to clean off the mites once they get older into 3 weeks post emergence.  Young bees that
are recently emerged don't know how to clean themselves yet.  I also study the drones to see how much mite load they're carrying.  That will be another post to
find some fascinating discovery there.   The title would be "using drones sampling for mites" instead of the worker bees. 

If you have super hygienic bees that can clean up the mites then they will survive the winter otherwise the colony will be doomed over the winter.  My trick is to help those colony that can survive with marginal mite fighting ability.   Over time without any treatment some will have better mite resistance power.  This is my long term goal.   I already know that in my area there are early flying bees in late Dec.- Jan.   So there might be some resistant bees out there I can incorporate into my queen breeding program.   On my 3rd year I found a hive with very little mites indicating that there are resistant bees out there.

[bwallace23350]

Ace, if you allow the colony to die, what are you going to replace it with?

Survivors.  And out of those survivors only the ones that produce.
Insects multiply very rapidly.  Why waste your time with the ones that can't survive?  Why not focus your time and energy on the ones that can survive and produce what you want?

Yep this is my goal. To get mite resistant bees and then keep them going. If I lose a swarm of them that is ok as then I am at least ok that a solid stock of bees is now out in the world.