Varroa control with forced brood breaks.

All about how i have used new cages last summer to cage my queens and give the colony a brood break. queens were caged in July last summer, just as the summer flow was finishing.

[flatwoodsbeefarm]

Great video Richard. I have been chemical-free since 2014. I truly think that strategic brood breaks as part of my colony management has been the key to that being possible. Keep up the great work and we love your videos.

[chrisboulanger]

Another way to achieve the same results without needing cages and cutting frames. Promoted by dr. Jennifer Berry in U.S.A..
Move queen over an excluder into honey super or an empty box making sure that there is only one empty drawn frame for her to lay in (rest could be honey or foundation).
Bees have access to her, still moving her pheromones around. Queen is not stressed because of confinement; can still lay on that empty
drawn frame. After 13 days, excluder is removed. Queen has access to the whole hive and keeps laying. The frame she laid in above the
excluder is removed and used to start new nucs. The colony is treated with oxalic 7 days after releasing the queen; by then there is
no capped brood in the hive and all the mites are phoretic. The new nucs started are also treated with oxalic 19 days (or so) after introducing
a queen cell.

[lagrangebees]

Here's a Trick Ian Steppler uses to find his queens with next to no effort:
1: Use a spare Brood chamber Or remove the brood comb.
2: Place an excluder attached to a bottomless container/ old super on top of your brood chamber .
3: Take your frames and shake the bees on top of the excluder. Bees will go down through it but the queen won't :)
Its basically making a bee sieve that will only retain queens (and drones).

[davecavana]

This is one of the most important videos on varroa on YouTube. Thank you for this.

[JCsBees]

Wow! That queen catcher is amazing! I want one. lol

[Peter_Gunn]

Great job explaining. Very thorough and informative. Glad it worked out so well. Thanks so much for sharing.

[nkapiariesjeffbeezos]

Brilliant design, thanks for sharing. Nice seeing you at Hive Live

[researcherAmateur]

My biggest misteke was knowing about it from ltalians for 15 years, and l whayted 4 years to try it.. and one more to do it on most of my hives.
The way they polish and prepare the frames over the brood break, and how fast the queen lays after it is beautiful. The jump of a generation of brood in the long dearth saved my bees.
I was whayting for this.. Great job. I knew you will explain it.. now it's on them to try

[emmawood]

Working my way through all your vid and this one is great, will be trying brood breaks and ordering my self a cage. Thanks alot

[thesloppyscientist]

I was also really impressed with these cages.

[nicolasragot]

Many thanks Richard for this massive batch of informations ! I will quickly order some cages and of course a queen catcher ! Warm thanks for these clear informations, sharing opinion ! In addition, I can inprove my english level ;-)
Warm regards, Nicolas

[garryfurnell]

Thanks, Richard. Great information . I'll give it a go this season.

[pomicultorul]

once again I envy your work ethics! and I am very much in agreement with you when it comes to trying new things. in addition to making you very proud when you get good results it also makes beekeeping much more fun. good luck my friend and I hope we will see you soon moving your operations in the new building. with your ever increasing workload you need to become as efficient as you possibly can.

[jesshowe]

I'm not using Apivar anymore last spring putting one strip into nucs I had 9 nucs go queenless the following week. It had to be Apivar
I had also unexplained Queen disappearance in the autumn after using Apivar. I also so had a large drop varroa using oxalic acid after using Apivar I did send a message to manufacturers of Apivar they never got back to me.

[strugglingbeekeepermarkcot]

Great video thanks for sharing I am a beekeeper here in the states. Going into my 4th year. I lost some of my bees over the winter. It was because of the mites and me. Setting out swarm traps in April to see if I can catch some bees.

[tomfuller]

Always to the point and understandable

[Hirokiji]

Beekeeping has turned into such a rigmorale with all these damn introduced threats. It's amazing how these threats to bees have come in such recent times, when beekeeping has been around for so long when the biggest issue used to be keeping bees warm during long winters.

[kathyhathaway]

What a great informative video with so much detail. I think you have hit the nail on the head by doing it this way . I was not sure about after you released the queen back in do you leave the queen cage mounted into the frame to have it in place for the next time or do you remove the cage also thanks again for all your video’s.

[hootervillehoneybees]

Brood breaks oav treatment is important. Good way to take out any mites building up immunity to Amitraz .. we get nice long one in the north .. wasn't for that I'd be doing something for a brood break

[jeffreyhoffmann]

Those are nice queen cages. I can't find those in the USA. I've been looking for years.