Mites 2022

Below are photos of mites from years before- as examples as I have none right now- though I have a thousand photos of them, in my trying to figure out why my hives seemed to be magnets, despite trying every treatment and practice, by the book, and plenty of times out of it, in trying to knock them down.

Year 27, and I remain clueless on how to do this with certainty. So depressing. "Clueless" might be exaggerating- suggesting that I have no idea how to even approach the problem- but I think I've applied more of my brain power and efforts to this than pretty much any life endeavor.  With no measurable improvement that I know of. They remain prevalent, unpredictable, and deadly.

Which oddly, is not everyone else's experience, of so I hear. Some beeks do a single treatment a year , and it knocks them all back. I could do 10- and have done so and more- and they seem to love it. Like I am feeding them. Like it makes mites happy to have a variety of diet- oxalic, formic, apivar.....

It's possible that you are a beekeeper and reading this (unlikely, no one reads this, and if they do, not a beekeeper), and you think: gee- I don't have that problem. I just see a few mites...

And I'd ask- really? Then you're insanely lucky. Though - have you looked? Have you lost hives in winter? Have you opened up a few hundred frames under a scope to know that for sure? Do you do autopsies? Do you know what to look for? 

An autopsy- a wingless DWV bee atop infested brood

Today, two weeks into January, I treated the worst hives with a second round of OAV. 

The most infested hive on Jan 10 had a mite drop of 200 mites, with one OAV treatment, measured after two days. That's insane. A hive treated fully all year long, on schedule, and my log says treated with FORMIC Pro in late October?  Yet infested like that?

I treated that hive again on day 3- and on day 5 (today) found another 150 mites. So I treated them again, 3x in January? Who does that?

Next worse hive had 100 , and then a 50 count was the next worse- and a host of hives less than 10 - which easily could be dead outs, or close (the number means little about how many bees there are).

There's no clear solution. Though I can report that I feel I've tried a lot of methods, and methodically as hell (email me if you want to know the various ways I've tried). Maybe I've bred a mite friendly population of bees? Or, an aggressive version of mites? Can one do that in 28 years?

I'll put the coming year into it- one more try. I sell a lot of honey- and people seem to think it remarkable and delicious- but it sure seems sometimes like the amount of effort one pours into something, trying to make it work, doesn't always equate to success. Nor does it mean one even learns from the lesson- heck, with beekeeping, I remain fairly clueless about the "secret". Similar to pretty much every human endeavor and relationship. All a mystery.