olbe

both

I had some of them once James

was a fairly quiet backwater where I am but since the new standards came in have seen a massive increase in others moving in , lot of corporates but also a lot of smaller newer players chasing what is usually around 5-8 npa blend every other year.

I actually got some Mono this year and now my bank account would love to see it sold, maybe if I survive this covid bug I'll have some cash in hand by the end of the year.

$50 to $100 in two years, and now we have had our 1 in 10 year crop the new players around me (steens, King honey , and half a doz other corps ) will probably jump to $200 to try and drive us out.

yes I use it, and every time I do i get an email telling me the co-ordinates are in the wrong format and that I need to change the format, I reply its their map and their format and I can't change their system ! It aint my stuff up and I aint gonna fix it.

why not just use the map on apiweb

I get the board precut to 400x350 then we cut 11 strips @ 400 x 30 per sheet, we then fold strips before soaking, we have costed out to around 4.5 cents cost per strip before soaking. we use 2000 micron board food contact ( not supposed to say food grade anymore) .

I use solid fibre board from Oji fibre solutions , but we buy by the pallet enough board to make around 22000 strips. smaller quantities you should be able to get from somewhere like Attwoods, Their Hamilton store will cut board to size , so I assume there other stores will also do the same. I know others have found more suppliers out there but I don't know who they are . I don't see a need to try gib tape as the board works very well for me, we soak for 48 hrs , then leave to dry for about a week before using

I use screened floors and most hives will have no card dust on the screen , some will have little mounds of card dust on the floor , these look as if the bees don't touch them as they are usually neatly rounded piles. I sometimes wonder if the bees that eject the card dust are perhaps more hygenic and maybe I should be using this as part of my breeder criteria. When I first started seriously playing around oxalic strips I used my home apiary which had a lot of poorly performing hives that I had brought home plus a few good hives that had high mite counts and some DWV , these were my trial hives, the highest mite count was 68 per 300 bees in April. That hive went from a full box of bees in April down to 4 frames by August and early October was strong enough to split. I had several hives that got down to about a cup of bees in August but only lost one of those hives, I had around 30 hives at home for my trial. Have used Oxalic every year since then and don't really see anything that would stop me using as a spring or autumn treatment. I will say that some of these hives had a oxalic vapor treatment as this was when the university of sussex published their research paper on oxalic vapor so we made a vaporiser and tried it.

Alistair, a sick hive , a slow down in brood rearing , mites hatching from existing brood, could be the reason for higher mite count after seven days . If it was me I'd hang in there a bit longer , an opportunity for a learning experience maybe .

As beekeepers we probably should all be certified!!

I would have thought you would be very Apihappy with that

You guys could try the CO2 method , you don't have to buy the fancy gizmo just get one of the bike CO2 pumps and with a few mods you will be able to make it work I have not used CO2 myself but Trevor has a video somewhere I think.

Unfortunately the PC brigade got involved and increased the bureaucratic costs way out of proportion