This letter is being written on January 11, and the current Dothan temperature is 73 F.  By way of comparison, the current Gaithersburg temperature is 58 F. However, the temperature is expected to fall in both places tomorrow, with our Dothan predicted high being in the mid-40s, and Gaithersburg about 10 degrees less.  Even colder temperatures are predicted for the next few days.

So, what does my local weather have to do with beekeeping?  Read on and see.

I took advantage of the brief warm spell to do a winter assessment on my colonies.   As for the hive work involved, all I did was open up the covers and peer in to see if the food stores looked OK.  No need to remove frames to do that; I saw that the bees were not up to the top and all the colonies had good stores of capped honey – no need to go in further.

My inspection included 48-hour sticky board Varroa mite assessments (I like the non-invasive nature of sticky board assessments).  The results were all over the place; the highest colony’s board had 53 mites, and the lowest colony’s board had 2 mites.  All of my colonies had very low mite counts when last assessed in September 2017, and here I was looking at a mite explosion in several of my colonies.  The main takeaway from this survey was that just because a colony had a very low mite count in my September assessment did not mean the mite count would stay low over the winter.

My mite count numbers are in the range where something will need to be done in the near future.  Here is where the expected temperatures for next week come into play. I like to use a vapor treatment during the cool part of the year, and my treatment of choice this year will be formic acid (Mite Away Quick Strips®).  The instructions for Mite Away Quick Strips® say that the daily high temperature for the week after putting in the strips needs to be at least 50 F (10 C), and that isn’t going to happen in Dothan next week. Accordingly, I have to postpone my treatment until a warmer week is predicted; fortunately, that won’t be too far away in South Alabama.

Varroa control around here seems to have settled into a pattern of two treatments a year; a vapor-based treatment in the cool part of the year and a contact strip treatment in the hot part of the year.  With each treatment having a different mechanism, the chances of Varroa developing resistance to a treatment is lowered.  I chose Mite Away Quick Strips® for this year’s vapor treatment because I have not used it before (element of surprise on my mites), and the application does not call for expensive special equipment like a respirator and vaporizing device.  Also, the formic acid vapor is supposed to be able to kill mites in capped cells.

As to how well the formic acid works, I plan on doing follow-up testing about the latter part of February, and I’ll tell you the results when I get them.

And that’s the news from the South.  Looking ahead, next month brings the annual Alabama Beekeeping Symposium, which is always a source of new information.  In the meantime, do a mite survey on your own colonies; you find the mites need attention sooner than you thought. If you have screened bottom boards, you can do sticky board assessments without having to open the colonies.

-Bill Miller