Pardon Me if I'm too Blab-bee

          Hi everybuzzy, here is another update post about what I did during the week. I went in to the CHRBC twice this week- once on Monday and once on Wednesday. On Monday, Mr. Meikle and I did hive evaluations on all the hives involved in our experiment. In hive evaluations, hives are taken apart piece by piece, and each piece is weighed individually on a scale. Pictures are also taken of each frame so that the amount of brood in each frame can be counted and an estimation can be made of their weight. Since the hives are already mounted on scales, the weight of all the components can be subtracted from the hive's total weight to obtain the mass of all the adult bees in the colony. The parts we weighed were: the hive lid, the box, the entrance reducer (which controls the amount of bees that can enter and exit the hive), the tarpalet (a small tarp that covers the hive scale), the strap (which keeps the lid fastened when hives are being moved), the frames, the riser (which raises the lid about an inch to make room for sensors and/or pesticide treatments) and the bottom board (a small drawer with a sticky-board fixed on top that catches all the detritus that falls from a hive).
         After weighing the components of all six hives, we removed the sticky-board from the bottom boards and brought them back to the lab. A sticky-board is a thick piece of paper covered with Vaseline that catches everything that falls from the frames of a Langstroth beehive. The purpose of putting the sticky-boards in place is to catch Varroa destructor mites that are removed from recently vacated brood cells by bees or fall off their hosts. Beekeepers and researchers can obtain two key pieces of information from sticky-boards- they can see how heavily infested with mites a beehive is by counting the mites on its board, and they can determine how many mites are falling per day by dividing the total number of mites by how many days a board has been in place. In short, we counted the amount of Varroa on our hives' sticky-boards once we got back to the lab. These hive evaluations are crucial to our experiment because we need to know where the hives are at before we apply the treatments so we know how much the treatments affected the hives.
        On Wednesday, we applied the treatments (Apivar and Apiguard, whose active ingredients are Amitraz and thymol). I'll include a picture of what they look like. Apiguard is a gel that is placed onto cards which are put on top of a beehive's frames, and Apivar comes spread onto plastic strips that are inserted in between the frames.

Apivar strips.

Apiguard gel. There is about 25g of gel on the hive tool (yes, that's what it's called), which is the recommended dosage for an average beehive.

            That's it for this week's update- I'll try to get in some "background" posts soon (but I'd like to get some pictures on-site first).

Packshot_apivar. Digital image. Apivar ®. Veto-pharma, n.d. Web. <www.veto-pharma.com/products/varroa-control   /apivar/>. 
Oliver, Randy. Apiguard Gel, Bulk Pack. Digital image. Scientificbeekeeping.com. © Randy Oliver, n.d. Web. <http://scientificbeekeeping.com/ipm-7-the-arsenal-natural-treatments-part-2/>.