To take advantage of the unseasonably warm weather today, my beekeeping mentor and I swapped out the solid bottom boards on both of my hives and replaced them with screened bottom boards. Not only does this improve ventilation in the hive, it allows the nasty varroa mites to fall through the screen to their death under the hive. Being first year bee colonies, we did not expect much of a mite problem, but we wanted to be proactive and stay on top of the issue. After removing the bottom boards and inspecting them, one had a low level of mites while the other had a moderate amount. To my amazement, both bottom boards were cleaner than I expected which means the bees were doing a good housekeeping job. In addition to replacing the boards, we also removed the hive tops and sprinkled powdered sugar over as many bees as we could to force them to groom themselves and hopefully lose more mites. I plan to sprinkle more powdered sugar (ground granulated sugar) over them in a few more weeks, insert the gridded foam board under the screens, then inspect the grid a few days later to assess the quantity of mites again. Our goal is to control this bee pest naturally without using chemicals.
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