As we wrote earlier, there are two main types of the mites among those, which falling on a sticky board - young infertile and immature female mites and old female mites that have completed their life cycle. But among the old maroon females fallen onto a sticky board, there are also two different types, each of which can give us information about the events taking place in the hive.
What are these two types ...
The first type is an old and not so old, maroon females, evenly lying on the entire surface of the sticky board in some quantity. Sometimes, among these mites you can find live individuals, which for some reason fell down on sticky board. What all these mites have in common, is that they all fall from the worker bees on which they fed between reproduction cycles. These mites can fall both in the presence of the reproduction process of new generations of mites in the brood of bees, and in the complete absence of brood in the bee colony. Basically, they just show the presence of the mites as such, and, to a greater or lesser extent, indicate their number. But this information is not reliable, since there may be periods, when only young and strong representatives of the Varroa genus remained in the bee family, and they are not going to die. The absence of mites drop at such moments cannot in any way indicate the absence of the mites in the bee colony. This usually happens in May-June, when the overwintered females gradually die off, and only young mature females of this season remain in the bee colony.
The second type is old mature females that die during the reproduction process. We believe, that reproduction is the most costly process in terms of forces, which stimulates the death of old females at the end of the egg-laying process. The death of these females occurs in a sealed cells in which dead immature females or infertile young females also remain. All these female mites are thrown down by the bees when cleaning the cells, after the young bees emerge from them. That is why, such a drop appears synchronously with the emergence of young bees from the brood cells, and that is why all these dead females are under the brood frames. This is a specific feature of appearance of the second type of old female mites on sticky board. What can this type of drop tell a beekeeper ... First of all, it speaks unambiguously about the acceleration of the process of the mites reproduction. Moreover, the more this drop, the more intensive this acceleration is, and the more mites are on the bees and in the brood.
The second type of the drop, that is, the mites lying on a sticky board under the brood frames -mixed up old mature maroon females and pale immature females, suggests that the beekeeper urgently needs to take measures, otherwise this bee family will be lost in this season. The next thing the beekeeper sees some time after the first drop of the mites of the second type, is young bees with deformed or paralyzed wings, crawling around the hives, after, and in the process of overflight of the bees. This is a process of dying a young change, which must replace the old bees, gradually dying from age "in the field" ... Gradually, without such a replacement, the family of bees will simply "dissolve" ... The hive will remain full of combs with honey, and sometimes with dead brood, .. but the bees in it there won't be ... they will disappear. There won't even be dead bees, because they are always die outside the hive ...
Thus, at the first signs of the mites drop of second type, that is, if the beekeeper will see young immature females and old females, lying on sticky board in a rows in the interframe space of brood part of the nest, then the beekeeper should take urgent actions. And in such situation can be used a very efficient method - a complete removal of the infected brood in a separate colony with its subsequent treatment with formic acid.
The small gap in brood release will be quickly compensated by the bees, if you will give them fresh, clean combs. But the regular and mass death of young bees, on which a lot of time and huge resources of the bee colony were spent, is irreplaceable!
Copyright Sergey Glebskij 2021
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