COLLAPSE OF BEE COLONIES can be a salvation for the bees, and not a curse!

Observation of experimental colonies in our apiary until the moment when the mite population became deadly for heavily infected bee colonies, gave us the opportunity to see what happens in a large bee colony when the brood begins to die due to the number of Varroa mites ...

This situation gave us opportunity to see, in fact, the effect of natural self-cleansing of the bees from Varroa mites ... The so-called Collapse of Bee Families is not necessarily means their death ...

Yes, in the presence of a large number of mites, many bees are born with underdeveloped wings or damaged flying muscles ... When they try to make their first flight around the hive, they leave the hive, and being unable to fly, crawl away from the hive further and further until they die ... on a concrete path, we observed this constantly ... The family, of course, weakens, but at first it is not critical ... At the same time, if the bees can force the queen to fly, the family at some point leave the hive and flies away ... Bees leave the brood infected with the mites, leave dead bees decomposing in cells,  leave even queen cells,  leave storages of honey ... But they find a new place, build a new nest and survive ...

Many people think, that the bees died or simply "disappeared"...  We think, that this is a big mistake. The bees just find a new place to continue their life, and fly to this place, naturally unexpected for the beekeeper, especially for the beekeeper who is not in the apiary every day and does not see this moment. It seems to him, that the bees disappeared ... All the frames are on their places ... Honey and brood are on their places ... but there are no bees!

We think that our observations of the populations of the bees and Varroa mites in the hives of our experimental apiary in the framework of Apivox Varroa Eliminator project,  provided an opportunity to draw this somewhat paradoxical conclusion: The Collapse of Bee Colonies is a good thing! This is a process of self-salvation of the bees from death, and the start of their new life!