Thanks for the hat-tips Fred. The SBGMI was honored to host Zac's presentation as it truly was an adequate demonstration of a portion of the SBGMI credo, "A collaborative and thoughtful mission fostered through education, intelligent dialog, and practice that will carry out natural management of honeybees in Michigan and abroad utilizing scientific principles..."

@@sbgmimedia You are very welcome! This video is sending me in another varroa management direction :) I really do appreciate that you've shared it here.

@@FrederickDunn cant wait to hear about it!

@@FrederickDunn hey Fred - the SBGMI will offer your viewers 20% on our annual guild membership until April 15, 2023 if they use code FRED20 at www.sbgmi.org/shop - This will give them further access to more great content just like Zac's presentation from Dr. John Harbo, Dr. Jamie Ellis, Dr. David Peck, Dr. Robyn Underwood, Les Crowder, Michael Bush, Steven Repasky, and more...

Thanks for stopping by!

Welcome - make sure to check out our other offerings. Fred viewers get 20% off membership at the SBGMI and we have 10 hours of conference videos available to members!

Thanks for popping over!

Francine, I shared the research with an Australian researcher and they shared it amongst their colleagues. Hope y'all have the most up to date info in dealing with Varroa.

I read that Australia has given up on verroa

Thanks for caring Dorothy! Thanks for watching! Be sure to subscribe and like!

Thanks Keith, I super appreciate the comment! I wish we knew so much more about the broader impacts of Varroa, and the transmission dynamics of DWV. Every time we talk about this system we are talking about at least two parasites: the macroparasite (Varroa) and the microparasite (DWV). Both have extremely short generation times (days and hours) compared to its host (without manipulation and depending on climate: less than annually to several times a year). Super fascinating for us to study, but I hope by showing where the mite feedings are occurring and the harm caused that we can better guide best beekeeping practices.

Thanks! What I like about our finding is they provide a parsimonious answer to a lot of our observations

Cheryl, you're welcome. My family and I have worked on a project for two years in Vermont with Troy Hall and Michael Palmer. We are trying to see if sampling drones in the spring can predict future mite infestations in the fall. This is the real service we are trying to provide for IPM

We are currently investigating that question

Jordan, when I use a flash treatment I place it into the colony in the evening so that the immediate effects are not so harsh on the bees (ii.e. cooler temps)

The video explains that varroa prefer drones as an adult host, research has long confirmed they prefer drone brood, but the accepted norm in varroa monitoring is that mites aggregate on nurse bees and then climb into the cells...

Mike, yep we are just uncovering that their preferred adult hosts are also drones. I agree tho, drone comb removal is an excellent mite control. It isn't a silver bullet, but an excellent control strategy. Why aren't more people doing it?

Stay tuned. We will have it posted up after some minor editing

Give me (and the bottles of compounds on my office shelf) until the end of the season for more on that front!

Was there any progress on this?

Hey, thanks for sharing your opinion. I did 3 years on the drone work and the transmission work. The transmission dynamics of mite-bee-dwv is similar to vector-host-pathogen relationships of tembusu, west nile, JEV, salmon isavirus, yersinia pestis. I usually acknowledge in each talk someone could treat or engage in management practices equivalent to treating when mite levels get too high. The fact is there are two parasites we are always dealing with mite (macroparasite), viruses (microparasite) all which have far faster generation times than the honey bee (days/hours versus year). And like the other systems mentioned, these are unstable when uncontrolled on the host population. So respectfully treating and requeening with a new queen to test her ability to suppress mite reproduction is viable advice. It isn't for everyone, but again, its recommendation based upon my findings.

I think it's about goals. Some of us have a production goal with our bees. We want our honey😁 and pollen and propolis and clean wax.. royal jelly, venom.. nucks... and we love to work on hives.. select for more, if we can. Others just want bees in a box that survive everything chance and nature throws at them. Some have a hive because is modern to be a beekeeper... l just don't see how can you learn anything without those first years of "digging" in your hives.. and how can you resist not working on timing them for max production on your flow ? I don't know, maybe not having a long dearth every summer makes a different beekeeper. Mine wouldn't survive the summer without me doing all kinds of manipulations and a different method to adapt to the conditions of that year. In 50 years my area completely changed.. from selling barrels of honey to regular 35 - 40 Celsius drought. Bees can't adapt to it without help.. natural swarms are all gone. Being able to do treatment free these days is a rarity, not something you should push on to others that don't have those beautiful conditions

That's a great idea!

Sorry about that! It was a tad loud. We'll look to normalizing it.

Adult drones from the center of the brood nest. Just randomly grab them.

Mark, in short- we did two years of work seeing if sampling a small number of drones early in the season can predict high alcohol washes in the fall. The short- multiple detections on drones in spring, yes. And yes, the drones drift a lot into other colonies within the apiary. They are a very likely candidate for inter-colony movement of varroa.

Probably, but why not just sample small number of drones from each colony and treat the colonies with high mites on their drones?

It's highly likely that you would block the entrance to workers moving in and out,

Yes, we almost shut it down at that point. But in solidarity and empathy - we allowed the road to recovery to continue! 😁

Hi George, mites prefer drone brood over worker brood, but the long established preference on adult bee hosts has been mites prefer nurse bees.

@@zacharylamas8016 Great response, thanks.

Exactly. If you lived in my area where drones are all gone (almost over night) by mid June you would already know all this. But what do I know? I'm just an amateur. It always suprises me that beekeepers over there whayt for researchers to test stuff... here we usually whayt on them to confirm our observations... Or, maybe it's all connected to money and the way research is financed... anyway, great presentation, and now its all known and beekeepers can use it and adapt their methods and treatments. How can an American researcher not know who Ralph Büchler is ? There's a problem of not being connected.. of looking to inside too much. There's a world of beekeeping all around you, and information is free these days. This is all too slow.. it must be over 15 years that we do brood breaks and all kinds of queen caging.. why are those old ones your new ones ? Mr. Dunn, I wrote you about it a couple of years ago.. and your answer was that it isn't natural and you won't do that to your queens.. seme ting happened with my comment about top ventilation. Please don't get me wrong. I would sound much happier if all this was already all known

If you had a real summer dearth.. you would know there is a moment right before it when you can pull out the edge frames of the brood box.. and on those edge frames you will find a bunch of drones and sick bees. And just by shaking those in a bucket of detergent and sacrificing them, you would get alot of answers...

Sorry had to... haven't tried but I doubt it.

So varroa management ability makes you a better beekeeper?

@@sbgmimedia Being able to do any activity successfully when under abnormal difficulty says you're good at that activity. But bees were thriving for millions of years before humans came along, and since humans introduced them to this parasite that has wiped them out in many areas, humans have a moral obligation to support them in getting back to being able to thrive without further human intervention. When bees can thrive living in a hollow tree out in the wild, hobby beekeepers won't need any special skills to keep bees alive in a purpose-built box.