Oxalic vapour or strips

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7
2
Marlborough
Experience
Semi Commercial
Dam it, I should of patented the "crowley cup" when Gino suggested, Then now I could of been living the life of a Riley off all my royalties on a beach somewhere warm drinking whiskey while watching the sun go down. But now I'm back in the "land of the bloody cold long white cloud" drinking cheap coffee thinking about going to look at hives as I drive past a beach.
Never mind I got another offer from Nigeria this week, I may take up the offer this time, not going to let this opportunity slip by like I did with the bloody crowley cup.
i think i may have missed this, but what is the Crowley cup and how is it used, care to share, ?
 

Mummzie

Staff member
1,284
1,161
Tasman
Experience
Hobbyist

Search and ye shall find....
 
4
9
Otago
Experience
Commercial
A couple of years ago we set up the provap vapouriser with an inverter and a battery in a box, and an anderson plug off the ute to charge it up and happily drove around the countryside fogging hives in late summer/early autumn to supplement our thymol treatments. We decided to closely monitor one site. To begin with it had really low levels of mites on the one side (4 pairs of hives on each side of the vehicle) and a lovely gradient on the other side with the hives having increasing numbers of mites up to a mite bomb hive on the end. To our amazement the low mite hives gradually increased their mite counts as they soaked up the mites from the mite producer colony, despite our repeated fogging. Did fogging help? I have no idea, but i sure wish we had blocked the entrance of the mite producer hive the moment we discovered it, as it took out about 1/3 of the hives eventually. Of course at the time of monitoring it was perfectly healthy to look at and we thought we were going to kill some varroa with our new gadget. So my 2c worth is to put the time and effort into mastering something like the oxalic strips, and exhaustive monitoring. I imagine fogging could be a very cost effective tool in a varroa IPM programme, but reinvasion is the bane of all non-synthetic treatments. Also, the provap kept giving problems, it was a really overprived bit of kit in my opinion.
 
349
449
Bay of Plenty
Experience
Commercial
My take away from the above vids and Randy's vids and peeps on this forum is: just because someone got a system they see working, it may not work for your out fit, and it may also suddenly stop working for them as well. Be for ever diligent and check check check your mites and do what ever you can for you.
I reckon Nz has just as many micro climates as usa and that mean treatments work differently from top to bottom and side to side of NZ
 


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