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  • From: Lewis Cauble <lewis AT hivebody.com>
  • To: bees Orange County <ocba AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [ocba] Hive Assessment Results
  • Date: Tue, 19 Oct 2010 22:06:18 -0400

Hello Beekeepers,
Our guest last week, Dick Rogers, came out to my place on September 8th and we went through each of my beeyards. I had approached Dick about selling Bayer CropScience hives for research next spring and he wanted to take a look at my bees. We sampled at least 1 hive in each yard. We went to 6 different yards and collected 8 samples from the 35 or 40 hives out there. 2 samples were collected from my house where I have about 12 hives and 2 samples were collected from Bowers where I have 8 hives. Most of the other locations only have 2 to 4 hives each.

Dick only did a cursory inspection of the sample hives and as I said the other day we did see evidence of varroa as well as some k-wing. No brood diseases were seen in the sample hives. Dick collected about 100 bees from each hive that were sent to a lab for detection of varroa, tracheal mites, and nosema. Dick returned my results yesterday and I was fairly pleased with the results. I was actually fairly pleased with the varroa numbers and was surprised to find that no varroa were found in 2 samples. I had no idea what the tracheal mite count would be and was also pleased to discover none in any of the samples. Nosema was discovered in one sample. I collected samples from all of the hives in that yard today and will have those samples assayed for nosema by NCDA&CS Bee Lab this week.

Even though only 1 of the 8 hives sampled is in the green for all 3 pests/diseases, overall I'm pleased with the condition of the hives. I treated my hives with formic shortly after this sampling was done so I believe I have the mites under control for the winter (hopefully moving more hives into the green). Other factors affecting the hives ability to over winter were not considered in Dick's assessment (population and stores) but I feel pretty confident that I have those bases covered. I'm looking forward to spring and hoping that winter does not drag on and on as it did in 2010.

In Dick's note that he included with the results he makes 2 points.
1. We cannot be complacent about pest management in our hives.
2. Our biggest challenge in beekeeping is to manage Varroa successfully.

I couldn't agree more!


I have attached Dick's quick and dirty report.

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Attachment: Lab Results 2.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document



Cheers,

Lewis




  • [ocba] Hive Assessment Results, Lewis Cauble, 10/19/2010

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