No one likes to treat for mites. The process itself is nasty and irritating. You also get a feeling that the bees would be better off without caustic fumes flooding the hive interior. However the truth is that your colonies will most likely not survive without some sort of mite mitigation. Mites are ubiquitous. Telling yourself your bees are somehow special and do not need treatment is setting yourself and your bee colonies in your care up for disaster. Expect 60% or more losses without some mite treatment or mitigation.
Mites are nasty things which are an invasive species originating from somewhere in Asia. These things attach themselves to bees and slowly drain the bee of hemolymph. Perhaps the more devastating problem is not the leach like behavior but the viruses that the mite brings into the colony. Viruses like deformed wing virus can be a death sentence for a colony.
Mites are just one of the environmental stressors that honey bees face. Luckily we can perform a simple, quick and inexpensive treatment with Oxalic acid. I use a heated aluminum block to vaporize the Oxalic acid. The treatment takes about 10 minutes and in most cases not a single bee will perish. In some cases the bees do not even take notice of the treatment procedure. The only affect I have seen is the introduction of the hot vaporizer block causes a bit of commotion.
This mite treatment will be performed once a month starting in July and ending in October.
