Central Oregon Beekeeping Association - Is February to early for Oxalic acid treatment for mites?

Reply to: Is February to early for Oxalic acid treatment for mites?

* Mandatory fields

Author

* Body

<blockquote>Richard Turner wrote:

As a follow up, I did do a sugar roll test for varroa in late February and decided to treat. I have now completed my third Oxalic Acid sublimation treatment a couple of days ago (March 19th actually). One of my surviving hives (of 3 from the fall as I lost one) is just cranking!, lots of Bees, lots of flying activity, lots of brood, and lots of pollen being brought in on warm days... and they are going through their stores. I have one more frame of saved honey to give them but I plan on starting to feed 1:1 Sugar syrup in the next few days. The girls really didn't like the sugar frames and patties that I put in the hives a month ago and were either ignoring the frames or hauling the patties out.

As I said, one hive is just expanding rapidly with lots of bees coming and going, lots of activity so all is good there. The second surviving hive is not so robust with just a dozen or so bees kind of coming in and out but without a lot of vigor. I did see the queen in the weaker hive 3 weeks ago and there was new brood and eggs but not as much as my heartier hive. &nbsp;I will look for her this weekend as it's going to be over 60 degrees and if needed I will steal a frame or two of eggs and brood from the thriving hive to 1) help prevent the thriving/surging hive from feeling like it may need to swarm and 2) to beef up the weaker hive with bees, eggs and brood. I will probably notch the egg frames in a couple of places to see if the bees in the weaker hive are inclined to requeen themselves.

Best of luck this spring y-all, it's a strange one.
</blockquote>

You can use basic HTML tags.

Body should be less than 50 kilobytes