Spring MAQS treatment

[jalentour]

Robin,
I am near your area and I like to pull the honey off in early July and start treatments.  I use OA vapor.
Waiting much later doesn't give the hives time to recover by winter IMO.
I have had very bad luck waiting until fall to start treatment. 
This year I plan on more brood breaks for several of my hives. 

[2Sox]

2sox - I read how slow the various Vaporizers were. Time matters to me. So I went with this one from the start: https://oxavap.com/product/provap-110-sidelinercommercial-vaporizer/
It's quick - less than 2 mins per hive, including warm-up cycles. (less than 60 seconds per hive if your hives are lined up in a row).

Like you, I didn't treat - and don't want to. But 100% losses didn't  work for me either. I am testing and monitoring mites. For the next few yrs, I'm going to be looking for traits and/or genetics that have hygienic properties to propogate. In the meantime, I'm keeping the pests at bay via treatments too.

Fwiw.

That gadget above is certainly not pocket change! I bought mine on eBay for $65 and it works great. With a new battery I got, vaporization takes about 2.5 minutes and I leave it inside the hive for a total of 10. I guess I could go faster if I pulled it out after 2.5 minutes and prepped it for the next hive. I just have to have a bunch of rags for this.  That would probably take treatment time for each hive down to about 5 or 6 minutes. That's tolerable.