Health Canada’s Pest Management Regulatory Agency has granted Apivar® an emergency registration for control of the varroa mite in honey bee hives from July 1, 2009 to June 30, 2010 for every Canadian province except Newfoundland.
Apivar is a sustained-released product in the form of plastic strips impregnated with the active ingredient Amitraz.
The use of Apivar in Canada is subject to various conditions.
Roughly how much does this product cost? i have never had mites before until last night when I checked on my hives and found that one out of my 21 hives has it so far. Is this product better than the Apistan product that seemed to increase the mites?
Thank you,
Reagan Breeze
Hi Reagan – I don’t have advice on the chemicals but there are additional methods to treat for varroa that have been forwarded to my attention the following link explains how to sugar your bees.
http://basicbeekeeping.blogspot.com/2008/08/lesson-39-controlling-varroa-mites.html
When it comes to survival of bees at stake, I personally would be careful about taking advice from just anyone the Web. Especially when those same people are selling a “kit” for $39 so make a profit from getting people to use their methods.
Dont forget University of Nebraska research that is sometimes talked up was a 2002 student project http://esa.confex.com/esa/2003/techprogram/paper_11648.htm and most of the more solid research into sugaring was for the purpose to detect varroa not as control measure. Stressful on bees, especially going into fall weather, time consuming and labor intensive for beekeeper and it ONLY AFFECTS MITES THAT ARE PRESENT ON THE BEES not the mites that are in the capped brood.
Formic and oxalic acid are recommended best practices by most agriculture depts and apiculturists worldwide. Sugar might do something in mid summer when varroa booms to economic threshold but should be considered an experimental treatment for a hobby beekeeper who doesnt rely on his bees for livelihood and for midseason when honey supers are on, but when colonies are trying to make their winter bees is not the best time to play around with unproven methods and risk the coloney.
I’m in Maine, my first question when reading beekeeping advice on the WWW is where the beekeeper is located. We have long cold winters here and the same things that maybe get by in other states will put a New England beekeeping outfit right out of business.
My 2 cents.