It has been a while since I have posted anything here and when I log in a message immediately appears saying "Eek! you have not yet posted to the forum..." So to correct this oversight I thought I would write a few comments about my experiences with oxalic staples. If you have questions fire away. I will answer them if I can. Otherwise hopefully someone else will. I know there are people with more experience on this topic than me...
It has now been a little over 2 years since I’ve used anything other than oxalic staples in my beehives. For those who are interested I have summarised how I use them and a few of my experiences to date below. I gave some information on how I make and use staples in this thread on the old forum (The Oxalic Staple Info Processing Thread).
Making the staples
This hasn’t changed for me. I still make them by cutting gib paper tape into 1m length and folding them to 3 layer thickness for use. I have found these to work well and cannot really see myself changing how I do this. I soak them in a 40% oxalic, 60% glycerine solution then hang them out to dry for a day or 2.
Placement/number of strips
When I started using these one of the things I was less sure about was how many staples to use and where to place them (there seemed to be a bit of variation in what people were doing/trying).
1) How many staples?
My first use of them was as a late season treatment (in 2019). I decided at the time that I would go with a rule of if there is brood in a seam of bees then that seam get one leg of a staple. This is pretty much what I have stuck to ever since and it has worked well for me.
2) Where to put staples?
Advice was also variable on where to put staples on the frames (middle versus edge of brood nest). I experimented with both and very quickly learned that to work well it needed to be the middle. By that I mean the middle of where the brood is on the frame.
Timing of treatments
I started with the standard early season and late season treatments. For many hives this seems to work fairly well but there were also a number which started running into mite issues by about mid-summer and I did lose hives to varroa because of this. This season I trialled adding an extra oxalic round in early December in a few of my apiaries. This has worked well. I think the ideal regime for me is to treat early spring, again in early summer and a third time in early autumn and this is what I will be aiming to do as a standard next season.
I have found the crucial thing is to never let mite levels get too high. Hives where mite levels have become problematic tend to take around a season to properly recover (i.e. even if mite levels are reined in they still struggle to thrive for a prolonged period of time). Pretty sure this is down to residual viruses etc in comb.
Some notes on how I run my hives…
I am not very consistent with how my beehives are set up. I run a bunch of 3-4 frame nucs (both 3/4 depth and full depth), I have hives on a single brood box and a bunch of double brood box hives that have either 2 3/4 box brood nests, a FD and 3/4 box brood nest or (occasionally) 2 FD boxes. Nearly all my hives (not so much the nucs) have 1 or (sometimes) 2 frames of drone comb in them for much of the season. Despite this I am happy with the varroa control I am getting from oxalic staples.
It has now been a little over 2 years since I’ve used anything other than oxalic staples in my beehives. For those who are interested I have summarised how I use them and a few of my experiences to date below. I gave some information on how I make and use staples in this thread on the old forum (The Oxalic Staple Info Processing Thread).
Making the staples
This hasn’t changed for me. I still make them by cutting gib paper tape into 1m length and folding them to 3 layer thickness for use. I have found these to work well and cannot really see myself changing how I do this. I soak them in a 40% oxalic, 60% glycerine solution then hang them out to dry for a day or 2.
Placement/number of strips
When I started using these one of the things I was less sure about was how many staples to use and where to place them (there seemed to be a bit of variation in what people were doing/trying).
1) How many staples?
My first use of them was as a late season treatment (in 2019). I decided at the time that I would go with a rule of if there is brood in a seam of bees then that seam get one leg of a staple. This is pretty much what I have stuck to ever since and it has worked well for me.
2) Where to put staples?
Advice was also variable on where to put staples on the frames (middle versus edge of brood nest). I experimented with both and very quickly learned that to work well it needed to be the middle. By that I mean the middle of where the brood is on the frame.
Timing of treatments
I started with the standard early season and late season treatments. For many hives this seems to work fairly well but there were also a number which started running into mite issues by about mid-summer and I did lose hives to varroa because of this. This season I trialled adding an extra oxalic round in early December in a few of my apiaries. This has worked well. I think the ideal regime for me is to treat early spring, again in early summer and a third time in early autumn and this is what I will be aiming to do as a standard next season.
I have found the crucial thing is to never let mite levels get too high. Hives where mite levels have become problematic tend to take around a season to properly recover (i.e. even if mite levels are reined in they still struggle to thrive for a prolonged period of time). Pretty sure this is down to residual viruses etc in comb.
Some notes on how I run my hives…
I am not very consistent with how my beehives are set up. I run a bunch of 3-4 frame nucs (both 3/4 depth and full depth), I have hives on a single brood box and a bunch of double brood box hives that have either 2 3/4 box brood nests, a FD and 3/4 box brood nest or (occasionally) 2 FD boxes. Nearly all my hives (not so much the nucs) have 1 or (sometimes) 2 frames of drone comb in them for much of the season. Despite this I am happy with the varroa control I am getting from oxalic staples.
