The bee keeping year ends with making sure your bees are as healthy as possible to get them through the winter. The two main parasites to fend off are Nosema and Varroa, neither is nice to deal with but it needs to be done....
Nosema testing came first. Sadly the spores of the parasite live in the guts of the bee so the only way to test for it is to obtain a sample of bees. The books suggest that the simplest way to obtain the recommended sample size of 30 bees is to suit up, grab a jam jar and behave like a woodpecker...
So having held the jam jar over the hive entrance, and knocked rapidly on the hive -just like a woodpecker would if it was trying to get in there to steal honey, its really easy (!) to get the lid on the jam jar of angry bees that came rushing out to get the woodpecker...
Their day got even worse when I popped them in the freezer to euthanise them - I guess the least said about that the better...except it doesn't really get better - for the bees at least...
'Cos after being frozen and defrosted they got their abdomens carefully snipped off...
And there's only one thing better than one abdomen ....and that's the full sample size of at least 30... :(
and as if that wasn't brutal enough they then got pulverised and made into soup with a little sterilised water...
And then a little drip of bee gut soup is examined on a microscope slide and the anxious bee keeper gets to hope they don't see too many of
these... those little things that look like rice grains are the bad guys and thankfully there were very few of them in my bees...so no nasty chemical treatment this year - PHEW!
So then it was onto Varroa control. Varroa is a nasty little mite that piggie-backs the bee and sucks its "blood" (technically its hemolymph), rather like fleas bother dogs, a healthy animal (or bee colony) can cope with some but there's a tipping point where there are just too many open wounds and the bees become more vulnerable to other infections and pretty soon the whole colony is compromised.
So keeping the number of varroa mites in your bee colony to the absolute minimum is key to success. Thankfully there are a number of effective pyrethroids which when mixed with sugar fondant and eaten by bees cause the mites to fall off the bees. So its simple enough to put some in the top of the hive, slip a board underneath to catch the bodies and wait and see what you find...
24 hours later....
There's not too much to see....perhaps I should leave it in there for a bit longer, then there'll be a bit more to see...
Lots of bits of beeswax and bits of dead bee weren't really what I was looking for - what I'm after are little red crab looking mites...
And suddenly ...no sooner had I seen one than there were loads of them ... :(
You think that looks bad.... look what I found a couple of days later...
So looks like I'll be treating them again in the spring.
And woe is me...look who else I found...
This looked suspiciously like a wax moth grub. These little grubs live exactly up to their name - they are the grub of a moth specifically adapted to feed on beeswax. In the wild they are probably really useful for clearing up all the bits of wax that fall from a hive but in a modern hive they can destroy lots of wax by burrowing through it out of the reach of workers, who would sting them and throw them out of the hive.
So the best thing to do is find as many as you can ...
They are grotesquely greasy (well you would be too if all you ate was beeswax) I'm sure there was a Dr Who monster based on them once back in the days when I was young enough to be scared by Dr Who.
I can freeze the frames that the bees will store honey in so that any that have made it there will be killed - there'll be no extra protein in MY honey.
But for now, there is nothing else to do other than scrabble around under the hive and scoop them out of their webs where they are beginning to cocoon themselves ...
And apologise to their mother that there are going to be 4 less wax moths in my garden this year...
Sorry Mummy moth.
