We've done the lilac display at Brooklyn Botanic Garden; it was lovely, lovely. I'm glad to hear there are bees. I rarely see honeybees here now. The varoa mites have done such a lot of damage. I did see a lot of honeybees in Hawaii in March, and I remember being surprised and delighted by them.
I talked to a beekeeper in the Netherlands a few days ago. He told me that the varoa mites can be controlled more or less by this method:
They prefer to live on the pupae of drone bees, not workers. The drones will all incubate in one section of the comb (I don't recall why this is so). Wait until you've got a good crop of those pupae, then take the comb, whack it on the ground, and let the chickens eat the infected pupae.
I suppose you can do it without chickens, if you haven't any handy.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2002-05-03 05:50 pm (UTC)I talked to a beekeeper in the Netherlands a few days ago. He told me that the varoa mites can be controlled more or less by this method:
They prefer to live on the pupae of drone bees, not workers. The drones will all incubate in one section of the comb (I don't recall why this is so). Wait until you've got a good crop of those pupae, then take the comb, whack it on the ground, and let the chickens eat the infected pupae.
I suppose you can do it without chickens, if you haven't any handy.
K.