Guilfordbeekeepers.org

I see the MiteAway Quick Strips are available at Brushy Mountain. Has anyone used the product? Can anyone provide feedback?

You should all read the thread on Beesource about it before using. I treated 8 colonies 2 weeks ago and checked back after 7 days. All but 2 colonies looked good and had fresh eggs. The other 2 had no eggs and capped Queen cells. I did shift the brood boxes to allow for more ventilation. I can't say for certain that the Queen was there when I began treatment but the population was strong.

David and I put MAQS in 5 hives yesterday afternoon (10/14). I looked at the outside of the hives this morning and saw no evidence of the mass exiting/bearding the strips can cause. It was cool when I looked, but warm enough that foragers were flying. Given the extended forecast and the good experience our last speaker had with the strips, we decided to go ahead and treat the hives that warranted treatment. The 7 day/1 time treatment is attractive and I am more comfortable doing it when the high temperatures are in the low 80's or less.

I'll post what we find after treatment.

We went ahead and treated our 2 hives shortly after my last post and when conditions were right. We wound up with hundreds of dead bees and thousands of dead mites. The bee mortality was disheartening. We didn't remove the strips until 14 days. The bees seemed stressed enough. After 14 days, we inspected and saw a few larva in both hives, capped brood and still a good number of bees. We could not locate either queen in either hive, but are assuming she's there because of the young larvae which looked about 3 days old. We are also assuming brood production has slowed tremendously this time of year. I observed a few hatches since initial treatment but am concerned about so few larvae. I had difficulty seeing eggs, but did not break down the hives entirely. The treatment seems to have been quite successful. When I pulled out the removable board there were too many dead mites to count!!! And that was overnight!!!

Oct 15, 2011
I put the MAQS in my hives on Sept 28. The daytime high temps were low 80's for a few days and then a few days with high 60's.
I was able to get into 3 hives today and found a good population of bees with a lot of small to mid size larvae, eggs in one hive and capped brood. The strips were still intact but were being propolized.
I still have several more hives to get into and will edit this post when I can.

Oct 16, 2011
I checked another 3 hives today and found eggs, larvae and again a good population of bees.

I wish I had inserted the board in the screened bottom to check the mite drop after a day or so of putting the strips in but I did not think of it at the time.

I put a strip in one hive at home on Saturday afternoon. The bees bearded some at the upper entrance, but within a day, that cluster began flying, and within a few minutes, the hive looked near normal from the front. I am seeing about a hundred dead bees in front of the hive--not a disturbing number. This morning (Monday), I looked at the 10-15 dead bees on the landing board. Most were very young bees, probably the newly emerging brood that was suffocated by the newly placed pad, and a few were deformed winged bees. This seems in line with what I have been reading on the NOD site.

I'll be curious to see how this hive does as well as the ones David and I treated Friday. If waiting for cooler high temperatures is the trick to using MAQS, this is going to prove a lot easier to do than Apilife Var and the old Mite a Way pads.

As of yesterday afternoon (Tuesday) the active formic acid in the MAQS should be out of the pad and now it is a matter of leaving the hive undisturbed for the remainder of the 7 day treatment period. Activity in front of the hive looked normal yesterday afternoon. This morning there were fewer dead bees (just a few) on the landing board and the majority of those had deformed wings.

I removed the MAQS from this hive and attempted an inspection. Serious robbing activity among the hives began within 10 minutes. I put a robber screen on this hive and closed it up for now and put entrance reducers on the hives that did not have them. Hopefully things will calm down soon. I did see old capped brood and polished cells but did not see eggs or larvae on the frames I could inspect. I did not get to see all of the brood area in the growing chaos. I will just have to keep an eye on this hive over the next week or so and see if they start bringing in pollen. If they do not and if they don't look purposeful, I will have to go back in and look for definitive evidence of a functioning queen.

I did a quick inspection last Thursday afternoon, and was not very encouraged. I saw emerging capped brood, but no eggs, larvae, and although I did not look closely, I did not run across the queen. There were still many highly polished cells. Since Thursday, the bees have been reasonably active but I have not seen one speck of pollen being taken into that hive. I suspect that my queen did not make it through and I am looking at doing a combination when time and weather permits.

I believe I lost queens about 10% of the hives treated with mite-away strips but almost all did raise a new queen that is now laying. They should be treated before the middle of Sept if possible to give the hive enough time to replace the queen before all the drones are gone.

I'm adjusting my thinking about how and when to use MAQS. I want to avoid high temperatures above the low 80's, which was the upper range for the earlier formic acid pads. If I use these as a Spring treatment, I can time it to the appearance of drones and the ability to get queens mated. I don't have to worry about whether they are on during the flow or not. If I am going to use them as a Fall treatment, I either need to have your timeframe in mind or have a combination plan set up for those that go queenless. I do wonder what more experience with MAQS will show regarding hives going queenless.

I took advantage of the warm and sunny afternoon to do a final evaluation and combination. The hive I treated was definitely queenless, but had not gone laying worker. I used my fume pad and bee quick to drive the bees into one medium super. I combined this with a very weak July swarm that still has a marked queen. The queen in the receiving hive is quite dark and there is very little brood. I don't know if she is failing or if she has Russian or Carniolan genetics. Time will tell, but I suspect a failing queen.

I did a combination yesterday and have about 200 dead bees in front of the hive. I guess they are not getting along so well at this point.

It looks like the wars are over and with yesterday's warm weather, foragers were flying and some pollen was coming into this hive. I may go into it this afternoon as the weather warms to clean out the remnants of newspaper and to verify that the queen of the receiving hive is still alive.

David and I checked our 5 hives about a week ago. These were the ones we treated with MAQS last fall. We removed the strips--the bees had done very little to them or to remove them. 4 of 5 hives looked fine and queen right. One of mine appears to have gone laying worker over winter, and I assume the queen did not survive the MAQS. Odds are this was an older queen. The hive was a primary swarm I collected from my yard last spring and moved out to near the Ag Center shortly after collecting it.

I'm giving MAQS another go on one of the hives the GCBA maintains at the Ag Center. It is the stronger of the 2 hives and was definitely queen right when I checked it a week ago. At that time, bees had built drone comb on the frames between supers. As I cleared off this drone brood, I saw more varroa mites in the drone cells than I had ever seen in any hive.

I'll report what I find.

By the way, all of the hives David and I treated last fall that survived the initial queen kill made it through winter and are building up/have built up very nicely.

I had one hive in that same condition that I treated 2 weeks ago. It had many mites in drone cells and some on the backs of worker bees but still was a strong hive. I was over cautious to prevent harming the queen or burning brood by allowing extra ventilation by shifting the boxes an inch or so and using screened bottom board. The treatment did not kill the mites under caps in drone cells as I hoped it would. I learned since then that you should only allow the extra ventilation for the first day and then block off the screen for the rest of the week.

I removed the MAQS from the Ag Center hive Sunday afternoon after the 1 week treatment. It is still queenright and needs more space. I plan on adding a medium with undrawn foundation this afternoon. The deep on this hive is rotting and I will replace it when I have more time.

On September 14th, David and I put MAQS treatments on 11 hives in 2 locations. Yesterday, September 22nd, we removed the strips. We used the full 2 strip treatments on all hives except 1 weak one I had. We took out entrance reducers for the treatments, but did no special preparations (like offsetting boxes). None absconded and none were deadouts. We checked 3 of the weakest hives going into treatment, and all were queenright. We will check the remainder of the hives for queenrightness in about a week.

I am probably going to do a 1 strip knockdown treatment on my hives at the house and not repeat the 1 strip even though NOD now says repeat the 1 strip treatment after 6 weeks. They did not have that on their site the first time they posted the 1 strip treatment as a 70% knockdown option (vs. >90% knockdown for the 2 strip treatment).

I'll post what we find about the remaining queens.

I put 1 strip treatments on all but one of my home hives and put a full 2 strip treatment on that one. Opening the hives has triggered heavy robbing activity. I have used all of my robber screens and it looks like serious robbing is now contained to 2 hives. I'll just have to see if they are able to make it. It's a difficult balance between opening the entrance for MAQS and reducing it for robbing defense, but I think the robber screens may be the answer. Next time David has his woodworking equipment going, I think I will try and make a supply of them.