A NEW APPROACH FOR DEALING WITH VARROA MITES submitted by beekeeper Grandpa Jack

At the most recent meeting of the East Central Wisconsin Beekeepers Association, there was a discussion of Randy Oliver’s article on using a shop towel soaked with glycerin and Oxalic acid.  The article showed promising results with the methods discussed.

Personally I will be trying this method when the weather warms and look forward to seeing the results that were presented in the February edition of the American Bee Journal.

For those that would like to explore this further, I have found the discussion on this topic that has been going on ‘Beesource’ to be very interesting.  For those that have never logged on Beesource, I will take you through a few steps to get you in the loop.

Beesource  is a discussion group (forum) of beekeepers, both large and small, commercial and hobbyist that discuss issues concerning beekeepers throughout the world.

From your internet browser, go to beesource.com  or type:  beesource   in google or bing.

Click on Beesource and you will be taken to the page.

  
If this is your first time, you will need to register (very simple process), and come up with a sign-in name and password.  Here is where you can be creative if you want.  My sign-in name is GrandpaJack, which is part of my trade name of “Grandpa Jack’s Bees”.

After you have registered and logged in, you are free to roam and see what the rest of the beekeeping industry is concerned about.

To find more out on this new way of dealing with the varroa mite follow these steps:

1) After logging into the Beesource website look under Forums header and go to the sub-category:  Business side of beekeeping. 

2) Under that heading, go to :Commercial beekeeping.  From that there, look for the topic of “Oxalic, Glycerin, shop towels – A promising stop gap fly swatter”. 

 
You can also do a search for anything that you might be looking for.  The search box is in the upper right hand corner of the sign-in page.  I found this discussion, by typing in mites.

Now….get ready to find out what the world is talking about in the wonderful world of beekeeping