A lot is written about varroa and its treatment.... this is a video I shot in the kitchen in April 2015. I bought a block of drone brood home from a hive.
Uncapped it and pulled out some pupa.
There it is... a live varroa. Watch this and learn... varroa mites are horrible, they concentrate viruses in your hive and will kill your bees, they breed like rabbits, preferring the drone brood as its breeding cycle matches the drones better than the worker cycle.
The adults get in to the cells just as they are about to get capped, settle down and get on with breeding, when the drones hatch they emerge as well to repeat the whole process.
I now use a system of every hive having a super frame in the brood box so the bees build wild comb under it to fill the vacant space.... This is pretty much all drone brood. Then every few weeks when it is capped I remove it along with the live varroa trapped in it and destroy it. This along with Amitraz and Oxalic acid treatment seems to keep it under control when used as directed.
They don’t have varroa in Australia, they never see bees suffering from deformed wing virus... they apparently think they don’t have the virus... David Evans from St Andrews University says they do have it... they just don’t have varroa so the concentration of virus in the bees I’d so low it has no noticeable effect.
So... treat your bees... with VMD approved medication
Happy Beekeeping !
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