Dog Days
Ed Colby
It’s early July as I write, and hot enough to make a beekeeper cry for mercy. Our western Colorado highs range in the high 90s. We did have 103 a few days ago.
Some of our ditches have run dry. We suffer from extreme drought in this part of the state, so you’d expect that honey yields might be down. Flowers need water to be healthy and produce the nectar that honey bees miraculously convert to honey, right? Not so fast. Paul explained to me that he’s getting a bumper honey crop from alfalfa at a drought-stressed location. He offers that alfalfa, with its 15-foot taproot, can survive with little or no rainfall or irrigation, at least for awhile, and that the plants sometimes respond to this by putting all their energy into nectar production, at the expense of growth.
I’d call that a silver lining.
One way to stay cool when the beeyard feels like a blast furnace is to jump in the river with all your clothes on. If you’ve never tried this, you’d be astonished how makes it possible to continue working, even in the most oppressive heat.
After fishing, Paul and I generally stop at the fly shop. The shop guys drop everything to greet Paul. Fifty years on the river, and you earn some respect. On our last visit, the manager grilled Paul on his day, before he turned to me. “Oh, I’m just Paul’s bodyguard,” I explained.
With two replacement hips and one replacement knee, you might call the gal Marilyn “bionic.” Bad hips run in her very large Irish Catholic family, and I suspect some German shepherd in her genetic makeup. But she still has the right knee she was born with. On the Fourth of July weekend, I heard a scream from up by the barn. I found my darling angel lying on her side. She’d gotten between Pepper the blue heeler and his nemesis, the mean golden rooster. When the rooster attacked, Pepper slammed into Marilyn, and there she lay. She couldn’t put any weight on her right knee.
We located some crutches in the basement. I passed up fishing on July 4 to help Marilyn set up for the Farmer’s market in Palisade. It reached 100 degrees, and poor leashed dogs were burning their pads on the pavement, but Marilyn did all right at the market.
After we packed up that day – two days after Marilyn’s accident – she visited an urgent care facility. The diagnosis? “Age-related degeneration of the right knee.” We already knew she had that. She started feeling better a day or two later, and when she took off the next weekend to visit her sisters in Denver, she left her crutches behind.
Last night I had dinner with some shirt-tail relatives. Chuck used to own bees, and when I was president of the Colorado State Beekeepers Association, I once talked him into attending one of our winter meetings in Castle Rock. He later described it as “something like a Mafia confab.” I never asked how he came to that assessment, but I do recall a riotous meeting. At one point, when someone made what I considered an absurd proposal, I, the president, simply said, “No, we’re not going to do that.” I cut that motion off at the knees. This was not exactly Robert’s Rules of Order, or democracy in action.
My Varroa mite counts this summer have so far been consistently low, as in typically zero or one mite per 300 bee sample, using a sugar shake. I’ve been giving colonies showing three or more mites per sample a treatment – either Formic Pro or Hopguard Three. Both treatments are approved for hives with honey supers. I only recently began treating, so I have no report on efficacy. I use Formic Pro when I can, but at most yards temps have been too high, i.e. above 85 degrees.
Heavily mite-infested colonies succumb to any number of viruses, and this can spell Fall and Winter losses. It’s the strong hives you want to be wary of, because Varroa breed and thrive in colonies with lots of brood. I generally don’t even bother checking my dinks. Varroa numbers naturally double every 30 days or so, so the mites are a moving target. Whatever treatment I apply, my goal is to keep mite numbers under 20 per 300-bee sample by late November or early December, when colonies go brood-less, and I can burn the mites’ little legs off with an oxalic acid dribble.
I had one outlier – a colony that tested 30 mites at the end of June. I can’t explain this. There are to my knowledge no managed hives within flight range. I ruled out these bees having picked up mites by raiding nearby colonies. But I could be wrong. In any case, I was surprised to see such a high mite count so early in the summer. Thirty is a Varroa count I expect in August or September, not June. This hive was at 9,000 feet, where temperatures have been topping out in the mid-eighties, so I was able to use Formic Pro. I gave this colony Hopguard as well. I’m not sure you’re supposed to use two treatments at once. But that’s what I did.
So how are the mites faring on your bees? You say you’ve never seen any? Did you treat? Have you done a sugar shake test, or an alcohol wash? You say you suspect Varroa might be somebody else’s problem? You poor innocent! You’ll just have to learn the way I did, the hard way.
