Hello from Victoria/Queensland, Australia

[2beefarm]

Hi all — Gergo here, keeping bees in Victoria and Queensland. AU is where NZ was ~20 years ago on varroa, so I read this forum a fair bit for the playbook — what actually worked as management matured, not just the theory. Also building on-hive monitoring tech on the side (2bee.farm) alongside the beekeeping. Appreciate any AU-relevant lessons from people who've lived through the whole arc.

 

[Alastair]

Your situation is worse than ours was because when mites arrived over here they were not immune to the treatments, It was just a simple case of put the treatments in, and a few weeks later the mites were gone. So we had time for a bit of a learning curve before our mites developed immunities.

Australia has got mites that are already immune. No time for a learning curve, and from what I am seeing most Aussie beekeepers still unable to see the signs of mites in their hives, then all of a sudden, their hives are dead, it is a surprise to them.

The traditional mite treatments being recommended by the Aussie government just don't work very well any more, if at all. My suggestion is go with the organic acids, being oxalic acid and formic acid. Me, all I am using now is formic acid.

 

[2beefarm]

Really appreciate this, Alastair — that's exactly the kind of on-the-ground read I was hoping to get here. The resistance-from-day-one point is the bit that doesn't land with a lot of hobbyists here yet — most of the messaging is still "treat like everyone else does" rather than "assume the synthetic pyrethroids/amitraz are already compromised in your area, confirm with a mite wash before you trust a treatment worked."
Question on your formic-only approach if you don't mind: are you running strips (MAQS-style) on a fixed calendar, or more reactive to wash counts? And do you find formic's temperature window workable across a full season, or do you fall back to oxalic (dribble/vaporised) for the cooler brood-break window? Trying to get a realistic AU-climate treatment calendar together rather than just importing a US/UK one wholesale — sounds like NZ's already been through that translation exercise once.

 

[Alastair]

I'm using Nassenheider formic acid dispenser units as per the photo. I can't give a 100% answer exactly how to use them because I am still on a learning curve myself, and have made many mistakes, but slowly working things out. What is working best so far is two ten day treatments back to back, in hot weather in Autumn using 250 mls of 65% formic acid per treatment, and in cold spring weather using 250 mls per treatment 84% formic acid.
It is very difficult getting it right, overdo it and you kill bees, under do it and you don't kill the mites. But right now for me anyhow, not much else works reliably. Using the Formic Pro pads achieves the same thing, but way more expensive.

 

[tristan]

as alastair mentioned varroa was easy in the early days, but reinvasion was the big problem.
some of the beeks here used to treat constantly during the first few years.
but the big problem came a bit latter with beeks underdosing and most used the same strips. which resulted in the first big resistant mite scare here.

having reinvasion at the same time as resistant mites is a major problem. most alterative treatments do not handle reinvasion. so its probably a case of running dual treatments. synthetic to deal to the bulk of the reinvasion then organic to deal with resistant mites.

also heat plays a factor in treatments, plus the length of a season. every aera will have to work out what works when.

nz is still very much in the learning curve. nz's bee industry implosion and subsequent loss off half its hives and beeks, has brought reinvasion back.

 

[Alastair]

Good points raised by Tristan. The treatment time frame for formic acid is very short, compared to the longer time frame of synthetic strips, which covered a lot of the time period available for reinvasion.
I suspect I am getting more reinvasion than I used to when using synthetic strips although it can be hard to definitively know. However I am sometimes doing a third treatment a month or so later to cover this, and much as I do not much like them, am considering using oxalic strips after treatment to (I hope) deal with new mite arrivals.

 

[yesbut]

And if my now single hive hobbiest thing is anything to go by Queens don't live anywhere near as long as used to.

 

[2beefarm]

That's something I've been hearing from a few AU beekeepers too — queen supersedure rates seem to be up noticeably since varroa arrived. Hard to tell how much is the mites themselves vs the treatment regime vs genetics narrowing, but the observation is consistent.

Do you find the replacement queens are holding up any better, or is it the same pattern repeating? I've been wondering if the queens being raised now are from colonies that have already been through multiple treatment cycles, and whether that's selecting for something different than pre-varroa genetics.

 

[Alastair]

Here is what I have found. Going back to pre varroa times, pretty much every queen would do well for the first two years, and quite often the bees would supersede her at the end of year two. But if they did not, the third year she would not lay very well. Supersedure almost always happened in autumn. Hives almost never lost a queen in winter because if the queen was likely to fail, the bees would know that and supersede her.
Now, post varroa, both bees and queens have virus levels thousands of times higher than before we had varroa. So we see queens fail quickly, and the bees do not always know she will fail, so queens can disappear mid winter when it is not possible for the bees to make a new one and she can mate. So every year many hives are lost in winter due to queenlessness, this was virtually unknown pre varroa.
Post varroa but a few years ago I would see queens being superseded every few months. Not many would make it to the end of the two years. But now, nearly all my queens are good for two years. I do not know why this is. Could be the result of some kind of natural selection process that has been in play, but I don't know. Also, in my hives anyway, there are a lot less winter losses due to queenlessness than there used to be.

 

[tristan]

That's something I've been hearing from a few AU beekeepers too — queen supersedure rates seem to be up noticeably since varroa arrived. Hard to tell how much is the mites themselves vs the treatment regime vs genetics narrowing, but the observation is consistent.

it would be interesting to see what treatment they are using.

i highly doubt its directly caused by mites this early on and certainly not genetics. it could be whatever virus came with mites when they came in. or possibly amplifying the effect of an existing pathogen.

 

[2beefarm]

Alastair, that's a really valuable timeline — the "virus levels thousands of times higher" framing is something I hadn't fully appreciated. The mid-winter queen failure pattern you describe is exactly what I'm seeing in AU too, and it's the hardest one to catch because there's no outward sign until the colony is already dead.

tristan, the virus-amplification theory makes more sense than direct mite damage to me as well. If the virus load is what's actually killing queens, then the treatment regime matters less than the viral environment the queen is developing in. That would explain why some beekeepers see supersedure rates spike even with good mite control — the virus is already circulating in the population.

Do either of you track queen performance over time? I've been wondering if there's a way to catch queen failure early through brood pattern changes, but the window between "looks off" and "queen is gone" seems to be getting shorter.

 

[tristan]

alastair is far superior to me in that regard.
we never really did a whole lot on the queen side of things.
we did have one lot of queen problems which was put down to high mite load in the cell raisers.

in the early mite days hives could handle high mite load easily. then that declined to the point of anything above low amounts causes hive failures.

 

[Alastair]

alastair is far superior to me in that regard.

LOL 🤣.

 

[Alastair]

Do either of you track queen performance over time?

My first beekeeping job we had a tad less than 4,000 hives, and the date and strain of queen was written on the hive mat of each hive, and they were evaluated each season to select the best breeders, true to each strain, for the next round. That is how I was trained, so for a while I did the same thing in my own hives. But then I read a very good article describing from a genetic viewpoint how breeding from a very few of the very best, is not necessarily a good thing. This guy advocated getting gradual improvement by excluding the worst 50%, and breeding from the rest. Thereby keeping better genetic diversity. As an example he talked about herds of animals on the African savannah. If you watch wildlife documentaries you see all the animals are superbly fit and healthy. This has been achieved over thousands of years by any weaker animals being picked off by predators and removed from the gene pool. But the herd is not bred from just the best few, it has been bred from all the animals, just not the weakest.
It made a lot of sense to me so now I do something a little like that with my bees. But I also breed from a specific few which are artificially inseminated to preserve specific traits from both male and female, but I try to disperse those genetics through a portion of the other hives.

 

[tristan]

there is a few stories around of old beeks who simply bred from whatever they regarded as the best hives. eg the ones they got the most honey off, and they got decent improvements.
two main ways, either select based on criteria or traits of the bees, or select based on overall end results.
eg there has been the VSH breeding doing the rounds, which selects based on a trait to achieve mite resistance. but who is to say that the trait is going to give the final result you want. compared that to randy olivers way of selecting based on end results, breed from hives with low mite counts. if you don't know what trait(s) thats going to give you the desired outcome, then selecting from results is a far better but slower way of doing it.

 

[2beefarm]

Alastair, that queen-tracking system with hive mats is exactly the kind of practical data that gets lost when beekeepers scale down or retire. 4,000 hives with per-queen lineage tracking is a dataset most researchers would envy. The fact that you did it in your own hives for a while — and then stopped — tells me the overhead was the bottleneck, not the idea. That's the gap I'm trying to fill with monitoring: make the data collection automatic so the tracking doesn't depend on someone writing on every mat every season.

tristan, the VSH breeding angle is interesting. If selection pressure is what's driving the queen-lifecycle recovery Alastair described, then deliberately selecting for mite resistance could accelerate that. But it sounds like the old beekeepers were selecting on outcomes (honey yield) rather than traits, and still got decent results. Do you think the VSH trait-based approach is actually better, or just more measurable?

 

[Alastair]

The fact that you did it in your own hives for a while — and then stopped — tells me the overhead was the bottleneck, not the idea

It required very little effort, but the reason I stopped doing it was that after varroa and their associated virus plagues arrived, the queens which had previously lasted at least two years, started getting superseded every few months. It became pointless trying to keep a record of them.
Now queens are living a lot longer again although not always the guaranteed 2 years it used to be, maybe I should start doing it again.

 

[Josethayil]

The Amateur Beekeeper - Varroa Resistant Bees

tab.beekeepers.asn.au

 

[Josethayil]

Maybe Australia can get some VSH genetics in to help with the Varroa issue. Plenty of off shore Islands to quarantine and test before bringing it to mainland.

A quick google search brought this up.


Importing Varroa Sensitive Hygienic (VSH) bees into Australia is strictly regulated. Whole live bees can only enter through the official federal quarantine process, restricted to approved countries like the US, Canada, EU, Japan, and New Zealand. Consignments must go to the Post Entry Quarantine facility in Mickleham, Victoria, where only grafted larvae/queen cells—not the imported adults—are eventually released. [1, 2, 3, 4]

Import and Quarantine Rules

• • Approved Countries: Sourced only from regions with trusted certification like the United States, EU, or New Zealand.
  • Quarantine Facility: Must stay at the government facility in Mickleham, Victoria.
  • No Direct Release: Importers cannot release imported adult queens; only clean grafted larvae from the quarantined stock are allowed out.
  • Freight Only: Must arrive via manifested air freight, never through mail or personal luggage

 

[tristan]

Do you think the VSH trait-based approach is actually better, or just more measurable?

i think the VSH is beeks trying to be far to clever for their own boots. they are only looking at one pathway instead of every pathway.
looking at the results is a substantially better way of doing it.

VSH is not more measurable. you might measure a trait but that in no way equals a result. what actually matters is the result and we can can measure that even easier.

this also goes for other diseases etc. if your selecting for results and lack of failure (breed from the survivors) then you also breed resistance to other problems at the same time. this comes full circle back to having queens that stay alive long enough in the hive.