Total Mite Load Recalculation

We had a black snake (Pantherophis obsoletus) catching some rays on a rock ledge. Black snakes are great for keeping mice and venomous snakes at bay, so I like to have them around. But that's not really the topic of today's post...

In the spring and summer, I'm always collecting data from my own hives and tweaking the Mite Calculator variables as needed. But the True Mite Load are not based on my own data, and are "sketchy" as I say on the main page. Today I edited the formula for the True Mite Load after coming across a University of Georgia Bee Lab study that showed an additional 1/3 of a colony's mites were present in the amount of capped brood that would equal about what you'd find in a deep hive body with a strong laying queen. (That's a mouthful.) Previous guesstimates I'd seen indicated this amount of capped brood would have about 1/3 the total mites in the hive. This sounds like semantics on the surface, but consider this:  If you have a hive with 40,000 bees and a phoretic mite load of 3% (1200 phoretic mites), then an additional 1/3 (400 mites) would give you a total mite population of 1600 mites, or 4% true mite load. Meanwhile, if you figure the 1200 phoretic mites represents 2/3 of the total mite population, then you've got 1800 mites, or 4.5% true mite load. This difference is further exacerbated when adding the second brood chamber. So for now, I'm basing the True Mite Load calculation off the UofGA study. As I continue to learn and find new information, I'll refine or correct the numbers to reflect my best understanding of reality.

Supplemental Feeding

It warmed up this week, so I gave the girls a little treat.

Here's a fun fact. Ball Corp, the namesake of the ubiquitous Ball mason jars like the one shown here, has an aerospace division that builds satellites. It makes sense if you think about it...during the early days of the space race, the US government needed companies with experience building components that could resist extreme temperature and pressure changes. Who better than a canning jar manufacturer? Ball has been making space exploration equipment ever since. One of their most famous contributions was the corrective lens that was installed on the Hubble Space Telescope, which effectively saved the program and led to decades of ground-breaking discoveries about our cosmos.

Counting Mite Falls

I got my last holdout hive under the treatment threshold today, which for me is 2%. With temperatures hovering around 38 degrees F today, the Mite Calculator came in extra handy. It was too cold to open the hive and collect a sample of bees, so it'd be tough otherwise to make an informed decision about whether I need to treat again next week.

If you've ever counted mites on a sticky board, you know it can be hard to keep track of what you've already counted. A few years ago I made this simple aid that helps with this problem. Counting one row at a time drastically improves the accuracy of the tally. Some sticky boards have a grid built into them, but for all others this is a handy tool.

MiteCalculator.com Featured on Popular Beekeeping Podcast

What a pleasant surprise to hear Kevin Inglin discussing this site today on The Beekeeper's Corner podcast. I look forward to listening to BK Corner every couple weeks, and it's easily my favorite beekeeping podcast. If you're a beek, there are few better ways to stay entertained during your commute or while you're doing chores. Kevin discusses MiteCalculator.com at the 1:22 mark, but the whole episode is worth a listen. Click here for the episode.

Winterizing With Snow Visors

I spent the last few days winterizing my hives. This includes my own little invention--visors to keep snow from blocking the entrance on hives at my outyard (shown in yellow here). This should keep me from worrying too much about hives I can't check on a daily basis. Surely someone's thought of this before, but I couldn't find anything quite like it on the internet.