Pinnacle

@Alastair I thought having a personality disorder was a pre-requisite for a beekeeper

Don I’m not sure this was sprayed “during flowering”. Jamo said the bees went in 4 days after application - which suggests pre-flower application. Some clarification would be good. remember the reduction in bees could just have easily been whatever the neighbour was up to, or whatever the guy over the road sprayed. We’ve pollinated kiwifruit for several years around the pre-flower use of these products and I haven't seen an issue. of course if they were indeed applied on open flowers, that would be a different issue.

From memory they all have to be used before kiwifruit flowering starts. Recommend the orchard is mown first so the sward is not flowering also. these chemicals themselves are not particularly dangerous to bees. there will be bee safety statements on each label - these labels can be accessed on the acvm website. However the restriction on before flowering use only is mandated by Zespri cheers

And my post is definitely not relevant

john jacob jingleheimer schmidt?

@Alastair for what it's worth, a couple of comments about our hives (have found staples effective and safe). 1) haven't put staples in wet. Don't care if they've got crystals on them, but we haven't put them in wet. 2) we're heavily involved in pollination - started in July in summerfruit, still going now in kiwifruit. Relevance is that they're always on a nectar flow of some sort and when they're not, we're feeding syrup to maintain hive strength. That might support your thoughts about stores vs fresh nectar. 3) we've got all hive doctor vented floors and dampness in the hive is never an issue. @CraBee I have to admit to some nervousness after reading all the above on autumn treatments and have been thinking similar to you - maybe apivar. cheers

Ted I'm sorry, but I disagree. As others have stated, this is very much an early trial product and we're all playing and learning to use it. While Phil has supplied laminated strips - at the behest of others I might add - he has been clear that they're for trial. I doubt that Phil has somehow made a stack of cash out of this so far. I think if he took his time, hive losses, machinery development etc into account he still be in the red (my assumption). if someone asked me to go on a "road trip" at this time of year, with hives at full rip, moves going on, treatments in and out, honey flow starting etc I would be telling them "no way". Again - this is a trial product. Perhaps those that have gone 100% hell for leather across all of their hives and completely changed their varroa management overnight with an unproven product, should be looking at their own decisions, not someone else's. Take some personal responsibility.

Alastair and others - I think the reason you are not getting answers is possibly because no one has those answers. This is still kinda new, we can all hypothesise reasons for what we’re seeing until the cows come home, but unless someone is prepared to spend serious cash on lab research to look at mechanisms for bee effects, we’re probably not going to get an accurate answer. as I’ve already said - I’m not at all convinced this is a straight bee tox issue. Reason being that once hives have had OA strips for awhile, it seems you can hit them really hard and they no longer have those adverse impacts. I’ve put 10 fresh strips in a double box hive This spring in an effort to slow them down, with zero apparent effect. However like you say, I put 6 in some boxes in winter and had a major bee kill as I reported somewhere back up this thread. could be due to bee health (Sick bees die scenario) could be due to bee numbers (large hive less OA per bee or some bee deaths not as apparent scenario) could be the acidification thing you mention (maybe they “get used to it” scenario) could be a food supply thing - someone commented above along these lines (during a flow bees cope fine scenario) hell, I’ve even been thinking there could be some gene expression or up regulation effects, with whatever that means for how bees react... there will be other suggestions but like I say, I’m not sure we’ll ever have hard answers, certainly not in the short term. ive played a lot with formic and pretty much all of the above applies to that acid as well. Using formic at the rates I do, on a small colony in say august, means they only just recover in time for our flow in late November! Same or even heavier dose at the start of the flow or if they are on the brink of swarming has almost zero bee impact at a colony scale plenty of ideas and it still beats all those little plastic strips I’ve had to dump in the past

@Alastair if you go right back early in this thread somewhere you might remember some comment/discussion or musings on treated hives losing some bee numbers After treatment due to pms or maybe virus load or whatever. The thought being that there was some issue with those bees that wasn’t obvious visually but became expressed after exposure to strips. I still have no idea what the mechanism is but I’m not convinced it’s straight OA toxicity, because I’ve only seen the symptoms you describe in hives treated for the first time. it seems when I follow staples with staples there is zero obvious impact on bees. I commented to Phil is is almost as though they have a “memory” and once they’ve dealt with it before it is much easier next time around. I know that’s not the right term, but once the hives are running on staples it seems I can stick any old number in and I’m not too precious about how wet they are or whether they’re covered in crystals or whatever, the bees seem to cope fine.

party pooper

Meh, it’s an arse-covering manoeuvre by MPI. History would show very few instances (if any) of compliance action in any industry sector, for those accused of breaching acvm regulations, beyond sending a “sternly worded letter”. I reckon MPI have published this so if something goes wrong they can point to it and say “we told them the rules” I agree with the pink cat, some group of bureaucrats has gone home tonight thinking they have accomplished something important when actually...

I did some work last spring comparing Bayvarol treatments (among others) with Phil’s OA strips. I saw the same thing you did @Alastair the Bayvarol hives grew noticeably faster and stronger and OA hives were delayed. I mentioned it to Phil at the time that I did have a honey yield impact as well. My thought at the time was that I had put too much acid into the hive too early as they were building and they struggled to deal with it and recover in time for the flow. the interesting thing though was mite numbers - these were WAY higher in the Bayvarol hives and by mid season those hives still “looked healthy” but were carrying a high mite load. The OA hives by comparison were carrying zero mites. It was a startling difference. I was late getting post-harvest treatments in, the Bayvarol hives collapsed over winter and the OA hives are still going strong now. this spring I have managed my OA introduction a little differently and matched numbers of strips to strength of the brood nest adding strips each visit as I thought appropriate. Our hives are in great shape right now. Unfortunately I’ve been using up old strips with no edge protection and these strips are being destroyed in as little as 3 weeks in most hives now. James your comment on Phil’s photo of a hive not treated since April - I could easily achieve that on higher-altitude sites here (and in fact have done in the past) they would be right on the edge of swarming now Most seasons, but build up has definitely been delayed for us this year. I’ve found autumn treatments like that, going into winter clean with good queens and plenty of food, will run through until the following summer - at which point they typically collapse.

@Bron a very clever niece indeed 👍🏻 @M4tt with respect, plenty of commentators are seriously expecting synthetic proteins to make a hole in our dairy and meat markets in the next decade. Currently we’re not well placed to deal with it. Per the video which is well worth a watch, there will always be a market for our high -end meat and dairy products, but currently we have a huge focus on low-value bulk export. I heard the other day about guys in Ireland unloading NZ lamb from cold containers - just bulk lamb, nothing to identify it as anything special. We absolutely have to move away from this and with some urgency now. back to honey and related bee products this was one of the major areas that enticed me into the industry in the first place. The potential for medical products and small volume (but high value) extracts for food and “nutraceuticals” is almost endless for honey (and propolis, pollen etc). We need to be sending small amounts of very high value products or indeed as per Brons video, we need to be selling technology and ideas. Again, there will always be someone who likes the idea of spreading honey on their toast from the land of the LOTR or whatever, but we’re fooling ourselves if we think we can sell massive volumes of essentially a commodity product at the high return we all need to retire rich. I’ve often wondered why the dairy industry hasn’t moved to extracts out of milk (for medical/nutraceutical Uses) what has all this got to with this thread? All of the above doesn’t happen by accident. We’ve got a lot of cool stuff going on in honey and other rural businesses but what we need is smart research, fast research, quality research and research! And how to we pay for that? We need a honey levy and the levy collected needs to be leveraged to collect government (and other agency) funding. I voted for the levy and I think while we may not be dead in the water without it, we’re sure making life hard for ourselves.

Olbe and Philbee that’s why I asked the question - we keep hearing about this oft-quoted figure of $4-5B Contribution of bees to clover pollination and pastoral farming, but I’ve dug for the figures before and can’t find any detail of where this has come from or how it was calculated. it is possible if it was looked at again, the actual contribution could now be much greater than this. Particularly if you factor in pressure coming on nitrogen fertiliser use. Thats why I think it needs attention and it seems to me this would be a Sensible and worthwhile thing for apinz to spend their time and effort on.

Yeah I know - that’s where I got my figures and why I asked the question. The 2018 version is available on line. kiwis, avocado, summer fruit, apples/pears, berry fruit, vege seeds and squash. my second question regards contribution to agriculture - is it on the radar for apinz?