Towards Varroa Resistance & Hive Monitoring

As I write on the last day of July, I’m calling it a day for the active beekeeping season in terms of regular hive inspections and honey harvests. I took off three shallow boxes of honey from each of the three remaining productive colonies yesterday and this afternoon’s job is to extract it all using my three-frame manual tangential extractor. This has been a bumper year for my apiary with a total of 304 lbs honey extracted from four productive colonies (Hive 5 has been queenless for some weeks and out of production). I attribute the rich harvest to good weather and low levels of varroa.

 It always makes my friends laugh that I should still be still be using the same extractor that I bought 20 years ago, yet I have a state-of-the-art machine for making soft-set honey. The truth is, if I play my cards right, Linton will do the hard graft of cranking the handle. A larger extractor will not fit anywhere and the house is bulging with bee equipment as it is. Everyone loves my soft-set honey and one of my customers wrote to tell me that the last batch was divine. I was tickled pink and glad I invested in the creamer. I have been asked to write a blog on that and I will do so very soon.

Himalayan balsam is flowering this week and will likely continue for nearly three months so every colony should collect enough stores to last through winter without my having to feed them sugar syrup.

Two colonies have had long brood breaks though I’m pleased to report that Hive 5 has finally got a laying queen after superseding the first new queen following swarm control— presumably because she didn’t get mated properly. However, all may not be well a week later as the BroodMinder sensor, inserted on top of the single brood box, indicates that Hive 5 does not have a stable temperature yet. I’m  hoping that this is because there have been several weeks with only single frames of eggs and brood that I placed inside every couple of weeks to keep the brood pheromone levels high enough to prevent worker ovaries from enlarging and allowing them to lay unfertilised eggs and produce drones. When I checked on the 27^th July (around the time I had calculated the colony would be queenright) I was pleased to see a palm-sized area of eggs and a lovely new queen. They have had an epic period without regular egg laying from 21^st May till now. These were the really grumpy, verging on downright nasty, bees all season so I just left them to get on with making a new queen with eggs from a colony that has been managing varroa very well this season. Fingers crossed for an easier time inspecting this colony next season. I’ve consolidated them down to one brood box and they have a shallow super which is filling with winter stores. The mood was much improved when I last looked in. They are still not thermoregulating yet though, so if the chart doesn’t show a normal temperature range of 33-37°C in the next couple of days I shall have to open up and inspect them again (see chart below).

You can compare the chart above with Hive 6 below which is on a double brood box but thermoregulating well. The sensor was placed on top of the upper brood box in Hive 6 on 25^th. I am a beginner with hive sensors but learning fast. Hive 1 didn’t requeen successfully and showed a similar erratic pattern lacking thermoregulation till I gave them a frame of eggs from their parent Amm colony. They should have a laying queen this week.

Randy Oliver/Varroa Resistance

Randy Oliver wrote a great article on breeding honey bees with varroa resistance in August’s American Bee Journal and I’m reassured to note that I’m going the right away about selecting my own best colonies. Randy explains that resistant traits can be lost between generations and you must continually monitor varroa levels and choose the colonies that are best at keeping mite levels low no matter which hygienic behaviours are responsible for keeping varroa levels low. So, monitoring is a continual process throughout the year and every year. Basically, I need to focus on colonies that keep get the job done in maintaining low varroa levels and not so much on how they actually do this which simplifies things greatly. If you have never visited his superb website then I highly recommend that you do, https://scientificbeekeeping.com/varroa-management/breeding-resistant-bees/ .

Here are the graphs reflecting my colony levels of varroa for July. Hive 6 (blue) never did want to swarm and never did get the brood break that I planned using a frame cage which featured in a blog a couple of weeks ago. When I went in to change the frame it was empty and clearly the Houdini queen had slipped through the queen excluder sides. I couldn’t believe my bad luck since the first attempt failed due to the design of the home- made cage I’d bought from someone. However, you can see that this hive does not have high varroa levels at the moment, and it happens to be one of the best colonies at uncapping cells and interrupting varroa reproduction. I also find a lot of immature mites on this hive floor too.

Chalkbrood in Observation Hive

Humid weather seems to have affected the observation hive and there has been a lot of chalkbrood on the floor which is a surprise because it has been a strong and busy colony since swarming and requeening and I thought that they were thermoregulating well. However, they have perhaps had a problem with condensation as overnight temperatures have dropped low on several nights. I took the hive and wee colony outside a couple of days ago and put their frames into a nucleus box which I positioned near the entrance to the observation hive so that they could easily orientate to their new home. I smoked the bees out of the tunnel leading from outside the shed to the hive inside and blocked the entrance. They have settled down nicely after re-orientating to the new position. It was a good summer with over 30 visitors coming to watch them behind the glass. I’ve learned a few new things myself including how a new virgin queen makes her piping noise to locate her rivals by pressing her thorax to the comb and vibrating her wing muscles.