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I wonder if this extractor work with layens frame system ?

Too bad you don't have something on the computer that helps show it all etc.

Don here i wish i can work my bees with no gloves on😊😊🎉🎉

Wish i can work may bee with no gloves on😊😊

HI Instead of using chemical Have you tried what the Old USA Beekeepers that started 1968 in the 80s used powdered sugar cived onto the top of the hive directly on the bees getting them to start grooming each other and mites fall to the separated observation medical bottom tray 📥 contains sand wood shavings diatomaceous earth to kill mites Cheers 🍷 🍻 🐝

Ukraine makes this process better on video th-cam.com/video/pKGu5mRdqjs/w-d-xo.html

PROSZĘ CIĘ 🤦 TO JAK MASZ 2 ULE TO MOŻE JEST SENS

Thanks for your thoughts. I am a small bee keeper of 100 Layens hives. Always nice to exchange ideas and adopt things have worked well in other apiaries.

These thoughts are helpful to share

As long as there is treatments we will be on the slow train to freedom from them. Look at other countries that haven't treated, they are done with it. Not saying ban treatments but maybe create hot spots and expand out from treatment free zones.

Troy, i dont do many mite washes either but i do say to most people who ask, the best thing you can do is: the one hard treatment in August will in most cases see your bees through to the next year. I am sure youve heard Mike Plamer say "theres always a better way ". I agree 100% I feel what you say, " i could have done better" and i say this every year. Personally i dont believe bees have much resistance, in terms of VSH Cory says he reckons the best efficacy would be at a maximum of 27%. UBO is still in its early days and there is as you say so much/many areas we could try to improve. I think you nailed it in your treatment regime. If the one treatment works for you then you found your "nugget" I cage most of my queens for 21 days and then hit with OA and that works a treat. it works well here because we have 6 weeks after the summer flow when the bees are doing nothing, so the bees dont mind the queen being caged. any year i hit my mites early is when i get zero to tiny winter losses. Thanks for sharing your figures and well done for perseverance in the face of adversity. PS your honey you gave me last January from the Knotweed was interesting and unique. never tasted that before. Looking forward to seeing your bottling machine arrive? Richard

How did you recover from that 90% loss? Did you rebuild from that stock or did you order in queens/bees?

I think as a whole most would love a resistant bee. But some folks make their living on selling bees and treatments. That being said some might fight resistance haha😮😮😮 PS Looking foward to the results of the queens bought from you this spring

I was tf for 12 years and still had bees at the end of that time. I was tracking resistance over that time using harbo like assays and could see my resistance fading over time and had lost the critical mass to go forward and build. I had to introduce artificial means of brood removal etc to keep the bees from collapsing. I was just maintaining, not building. So finally I had to change strategy, especially as I wanted the bees to contribute to our household sustainability, not be a drag on it. I had to start over. So for the first time in a long time, I brought in packages (an idea I didn't like as moving bee material around is not an ecologically sound idea), and queens from programs that take mite resistance seriously, in this case Saskatraz. And I treated using organic acids. My goal getting a healthy population of bees into winter doing everything in my power including nutrition. I think I succeeded overall so far though improvements are possible. Since I am treating, and cannot reliably use harbo assays, I will use LBO assays to evaluate mite resistance in strong colonies coming out of winter with some pedigree. I actually don't expect much this year out as the saskatraz queens are hybrids. I will attempt to get a breeder queen using an import or/and within my own bees if I am lucky enough to find it and set up a mating area with my saskatraz colonies as drone suppliers. Other bees will be moved to outyards, treated and requeened. Actually all of my bees will be treated this year. It is the next year I will hopefully see enough strong bees that I can try withholding treatments and going back to harbo assays. But my approach now will be to if in doubt treat. I will assess carefully if I can hold on to traits. I may have to continually bring in material to keep it going. Regardless, I will not bring in queens from programs that don't select for resistance. So, in short, I was too stubborn with my initial approach and should have shifted gears years ago. I think this new approach has more potential.

I live in an area with a large wild bee population that live with mites. Once I stoped keeping the the bees alive that did not have mite resistance. I only treat oa vapor in broodless time. Let the bad genetics die… clean up your bees for optimal honey production. If you graft a lot you bottle neck your genetics. 🧬 I believe this is a problem in a lot of operations.

As a new beekeeper, mostly educated on TH-cam. I really appreciate your honesty about dealing with coloney collapse. I feel that so many who are proponents of treatment free lack your integrity. You have earned a new subscriber.

The more I think about it the more I think we are too laser focused on mite resistant bees and are not looking at the whole picture which includes the mites themselves. The bee genetics is half the picture, the mites are the other half. Is it possible to breed for softer mites? Personally I think yes. What are the traits of a softer mite? How do we measure? I don't know. But imagine you have two sister queens. One is demonstrating excellent "mite resistance," the other not at all. I think a good way to test this theory would be to use treatment on the non-mite resistant colony and knock those mites down to damn near zero, then take a couple nice solid ready to emerge frames of brood from the "mite resistant" sister and plop them into the non-resistant post treatment. Then observe. Does the non-resistant queen continue to be non-resistant or could it possible change the dynamic within the colony? I usually get laughed at when I say this, and it only solidifies my opinion that we are so focused on the bees that we as beekeepers can't even fathom that the genetics of the mites (half the genetics in the equation) are playing a role in the outcome equal to their percentage of the equation.

Love my two queens I've got from you. It was my hope to gain some resistant stock into mine. I think many are like me, Troy. We want desperately to be able to say treatment free. Unfortunately, in my area, that would mean i was bee free in the spring. Im hoping to obtain some more stock from you this year as well. One queen has already shown it. The pulling of capping was apparent. And the hives mite count lowered. Now im hoping they make the winter, hives light from being queenless.

i've been into hobby beekeeping since early 80's started in south jersey moved into north east Tenn 15 years ago. i researched using resistant breeder queens. and i have used several over the years.my plan was to flood the area with drones from queens that i propagated from the resistant breeder queens to spread resistance thru the wild population around here. i don't count mites i just do brood breaks during swarm season combined with swarm prevention and increase then i have been treating with apivar after honey harvest in august. and i have better than average winter survivability. since they have come out with oxalic glycerin pads i'm thinkin maybe do an early spring treatment also. with the oxypads as per randy oliver and bob binnie's reaserch

Beeweaver, they haven't treated since the early 90ies. I've bought their queens but I haven't been beekeeping long to know if it made a difference.

My 2 cents: if a true "mite proof" lineage of bees existed, the queens would be valuable. Nobody likes treating, and if we could eliminate the mite risk with specific lineages that would be great. However, like you referred to at the beginning, it might not even be possible. Selection for resistance never "solidifies", or at least it hasn't in any selection regime so far.

“Does the industry want it?” And “to know this we really should be monitoring.” These two go together. Treating for mites is something of an insurance plan for those who cannot monitor every colony every week from peak mite season until winter. And that includes me with my big hobby/small sideline operation. I spend a good deal of time measuring mite loads and using the data (along with other measures) in my small breeding program. I measured a few breeder queens at 0/300 in August and September, but I cannot monitor them weekly through the long fall, so I treat them as a means of insurance. I don’t know how that relates to the industry as a whole, but after a couple of seasons I am seeing really strong and really healthy bees. Perhaps I will withhold treatments at some point, but only if I can work in rigorous monitoring through the fall.

Good video, as you say, but most don’t understand, mites are as big of a problem as what grain farmers, or cattle farmer or hog farmer etc… have on an ongoing basis. Beekeeping is farming. Husbandry is critical, just like the rest of farming. Solutions come from the attempt to overcome challenges and innovation leads the way. Can you imagine beekeeping back in the 70,80’s? You’d blow the socks off beekeepers back then . We’d look like beekeeping gods

Resistance is highly unlikely. The mite is a parasite that damages the host, and that host only lives a few weeks, shortening its already short life. There will always be a big crash. An uncontrollable, unmanageable amount of mites can enter the "resistance" hive from sources outside of their control at a rapid pace to swift for them to manage. Social bees transfer mites, robbing or being robbed transfer mites, drones carrying mites migrate to other hives, and as the mite bombs go off, the resistance hive, the remaining survivor hive will crash too.

I had a 90% collapse in 2021 as well, more like 95%. I never treated or took might wash samples prior to that. Since then I have been taking mite washes on every colony right after Honey pull and marking counts on the hive lid so I can see in the spring where my potential breeders are and where I need to requeen. I start using oxalic acid vaporization every five to six days for about 6 treatments. I’ll spot check the highest mite count hives with mite washes to see what efficacy it had. I haven’t seen any harm to brood. I’ll treat one more time after they go broodless. This has been working really well for me although quite time consuming. The hives that have 2 mites or less continue to be more common, they go the whole season right out of winter with no treatment so I get a good reading on where they stand after honey pull. The weird thing I noticed is that some hives will have a lot of mites and still be strong and still survive the winter and still produce a good crop of honey the following year, that may be the source of problems.

Keep on chatting up 👍 Thanks

I also grew my apiary treatment-free until one year we had an extremely early spring which meant the mites had more breeding cycles. So I started seeing PMS much sooner in the year, so to assist the bees I put in my first treatments. I now treat after the honey harvest and OAV in the winter every year. I also have put new VSH queens in the operation. One thing I noticed about the VSH queens was that they made somewhat less honey than regular mutt queens. I attribute this to them performing VSH and removing some of the brood. I visually saw this. So they were definitely good at VSH behavior. So my answer to your question about whether beeks even want a solution to varroa is, do you want Apis Mellifera to resemble Apis Cerana because those bees are varroa resistant but it comes at the cost of much smaller colonies and therefore much less honey. But you got to do something to fight varroa, either treat or breed for better bees, so keep fighting the good fight brother! Good video. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

I would like to see someone combine resistant lines with immunization for DWV. How do I get in touch with you about buying queens? I would not change my mite treatment regimen or monitor but would hope to be able to avoid drastic measures like formic acid late in the year. Good vid.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts 👍

Hi Troy. I’m right there with you on this. There is no treatment we can put in a hive better than a bee that hates mites. This year I brought in queens, including yours, to try and establish a modest breeding program. My goal is to get them out to our CVBA members. To flood the zone. Now I just need to get through winter. Keep up the good work. Bruce Kilgore

Can sheep be made to be resistant to wolves? Brood breaks may be essential. Along with late season oxalic acid vaporization.

Isn’t that an interesting observation, I can’t say I’ve noticed that but I’ll be looking now! To think of it, the golden west queens came in noticeably orange red, and I still see a lighter colour but now that same pop , a bit darker… hmm

Bees look smaller but weight they are not.. we can predict future crashes dwindle by weight.. taking 100 bee samples by weight we can also pick our best breeders and bees for cell starters.. light bees will have virus loads heavy winter bees will not... you could have avoided that big crash ahead of time by simply taking samples.. you know things are bad because weight is below normal and simply ran them south to that winter radish and nursed them back to health before they were showing signs of crashing.. now that we know they fly out in the snow because they are out of fat . We can weigh those and develop a very interesting talking points at bee clubs ... thinking like that gives one street credit and gets ya invited to the national honey show .. even a late brooding units will weigh less why we don't feed late just triggers brooding.. these warm falls like 90% of the bee keepers see them nests hollowing out think boy I should feed .. no you just reduce the box size keeping them shut down... want to save that fat for winter and spring build up.. late feeding like getting hit by polar vortex during spring build up really sets things back..

They are a carnolians with some Russian alll my bees are dark like that too almost black I’m up in Canada

Greetings from Russia. Nice little beeyards

you do not use candy boards on your hives?

Great video 👍

Bailing twine, got to love it! Darkening comment, very interesting.

What are you doing for mite management?

Been doing it like this since 1997. However, with warmer fall weather and slightly milder winters I quit wrapping in 2015. I usually winter ~40 nucs 4/4, no wrap on those either. Just top insulation. Can't tell the difference.

Love the clean honey house Wax looks dry, good spinner

It’s been a tough year.

Nice operation going on . seems like a lot of work for only two people. Plus a good clean up.

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what do you do with all the wax, can you make something out of it, candles or what ever. there has to be a good use for it.

Central Ohio here. We were down to 50% production this year. Drought... It's depressing but it's only up from here. Hopefully next year is much better

Do you seal the barrel liner before putting the lid on?

What mill liner do you use on your barrel?

Did you put a sealer on your concrete floor? Keep honey from penetrating?

Thanks for the update. Im glad you got a crop. Did you see any of the massive fall golden rod flow or asters flow that most of the North East Coast experience? From Ontario to Nova Scotia down into Maine, the flow was phenomenal. The flow stopped here at the end of June and not another drop until September 5th. Nectar was still coming in October 15. It was very late, I just finished feeding, and the feeders are coming off today here in NS.