Philip

My boss buys old carniolan breeding queens for our spring queen cell round, we also use these breeders for our autumn cells that they are still viable. For my own hives I just pick a nice docile Italian hive that seems to produce honey. Hybrids bees can be a bit nasty but they are good workers most of the time.

Dad says he used to feed seconds lolly like dry sugar to his the bees, and he would get all different colours of honey. I don't think it would hurt them, probably couldn't sell the honey, but you could use it as feed honey. Open feeding is that terrible idea though, as it can spreads disease.

We have ants in quite a few of our hives between the hive mat and lid, they seen to have only moved in in the past few years. They don't seem to do anything bad except they like to burrow through rotting boxes, that's also a help shows us which ones need burning or selling off.

Umm Yeah deformed wings are not an official reckoning of varoa according to the literature, although I use it as an indicator both at work and with my personal hives. If you still consider your varoa hive viable I would recommend treating with apistan as it is much more powerful than bayvarol although in the same chemical family, I would consider this an extreme treatment but I'm in the south island and hopefully mites have less resistance here, also consider replacing your queen with a cell or a caged queen possibly brought from a commercial beekeeper with queens to spare(hour queen may have