Varroa Mite Saga and Deformed Wing Virus (Part 2)

According to my records, I did a varroa mite check on September 20th and found one mite. I actually did a lot more checks and found more mites over a 72 hour period, but still very few.

On October 10th, I removed the screened bottom boards (SBBs), replaced with solid boards, and converted my hives to top entrances, for reasons I won't go into here. I was ready for winter, or so I thought.

On November 9th, I had a mess. I had decided to do one more check of my hives to try to add dry sugar and fix the bottom boards. But that went out the window.

As I approached the traditional hive (the one with foundation), I heard a dull roar. The bees were loud, all over the place, and something was obviously wrong. I watched them for a few minutes to make sure they weren't being robbed. I ran down to my other hive to make sure they weren't robbing it. No and no.

So I went in. I was horrified to find bees with deformed wing virus (DWV). Just a few, which isn't horrible according to people with far more expertise than I, but disturbing nonetheless.

And that wasn't the least of it. I took a few pictures. Only a few because of course the camera battery died.

Later, when I looked at my five pictures, I saw 3 mites in one picture. Over the last 6 months, I have looked and looked for mites in my thousands of pictures, and have never seen a single one...until now.

Here's the picture. The longer arrow points to a bee with deformed wing virus. The three shorter arrows point to mites.

As I researched VFW, I mean DWV, I found out that the virus is carried by varroa mites, so what I really have is a mite problem. DWV might actually be a good thing as it alerted me to a problem. (And hopefully I wont need the VFW.)

I probably over-reacted. That is the subject of the Part 3 (next post).