The Varroa Destructor Mite

Today, I went to Tim's to bring about 2 gallons of bee juice to feed all the hives for a couple weeks. My girls had drunk another quart, so I brought them another. They now have three quarts to drink for a little while. They are happy girls.

While I was there, Tim brought out a green frame of drone brood that had been fully capped. This is what they look like before the bees work on them:

These are used for IPM or Integrated Pest Management. You will insert this frame into the hive on the outermost edge inside.  Once the drone cells have been capped, you pull the frame out then can check for mites by pulling out the larvae. You can freeze the frame for 48 hours which will kill all of the mites, then you can put the frame back into the hive and the bees will take care of cleaning it up. There are other ways to check for mites, but today is about the green frame.

One of the biggest reasons of the honeybee decline, other than pesticides and illness, is the Varroa Destructor Mite. They are parasitic mites and suck the blood of honeybees infecting them with all kinds of diseases. They were not a problem for the honeybee until 1987 in the United States and it changed the way beekeepers have kept bees. Australia is the ONLY country/continent left in the world without the varroa mite. It's sadly just a matter of time before they invade there as well. They are nasty little creatures. They latch onto bees and rarely let go. 

Photo Credit: mecaibg.com

You can see them in this magnified picture. They are very tiny in real time though. They are hard to catch or see when you're looking at thousands of moving bees in the hive. If you compare it to humans, it would be like us walking around with a parasitic pancake on us. Like a gigantic mosquito sucking our blood! They are so gross. 

Here's a video of what we found after uncapping a drone.

If you look closely toward the end of the video, you can see a second varroa on the back leg of the larvae crawling around. 

The Varroa can give honeybees something called deformed wing virus. 

Photo Credit: http://sciblogs.co.nz

They can't fly and end up dying very quickly. If varroa take over and infect a colony of honeybees, they can wipe out the entire hive in less than two weeks. It's really really awful. It's so important for beekeepers to do pest management on a regular basis. 

The varroa prefer to jump into the cells of drone bees because they take longer to emerge from their cells. A Queen takes 16 days from egg to birth. A worker (female) bee takes 21 days from egg to birth. A drone (male) bee takes 24 days from egg to birth so the varroa have more time to procreate in those cells. Using the green frames will allow the queen to only produce the drone brood because the cell size is bigger. It can help entice the varroa to that frame which, if used timely, can help keep your mite counts in check and keep your honeybees healthy.

Until next time, bee kind. 🐝