Treating our Bees for Varroa

by Alan Cole · Thursday, September 5th, 2013

We haven’t treated our bees in the past as there has been very little sign of any varroa problems in our hives. However we did a varroa drop count the other day and over a period of 24 hours there was getting on for 10 varroa mites on the varroa board of one of the hives. The other had one or two mites on it so we decided to treat them both.

There’s a new treatment available in the UK called MAQS (Mite Away Quickly Strips). They sounded nice an easy to use and fairly effective too so we decided to give them a go. They are quite a bit more expensive than the usual apiguard, but only the best for our bees.

Anna collected the strips on Tuesday evening and I set to treating them yesterday. We needed to get a move on because we want to start feeding the bees ready for winter as soon as possible and you aren’t supposed to feed them during the treatment period of 7 days.

The bees were busy coming and going and seem to be bringing in loads of pollen which is a good sign. One of the hives also had about 5 frames of honey in one of the supers so I took that off and we will extract it soon. Hooray, a honey harvest again!

The treatment process was easy, simply remove the strips from their packaging, place them on top of the frames in the brood box and close up the hive. I did also remove the entrance blocks on the hives, just to give the bees a little more room to come and go and put the feeders on the hives ready to feed the bees next week. We now have to leave them for 7 days and hope all is well and that the treatment works.