Bro love your style, everytime someone tells me I’m to inexperienced I watch your vids. Deep end of the pool baby, trail by fire best way to learn! Love the 🔥 keep slinging those pix axes my man
Love this, another tool in the toolbox. We still the manual counting method. Great interview. Hopefully this will spur sideliners and small commercial peeps to dip their toe in it
It's great to see a follow up of this gals work. I watched a video or 2 that focused on her work in the beginning of Spring I think, even as a new beekeeper I found it very interesting and promising. My big detractor is high costs and claims of non-delivering hygienic. This spray test looks very promising, hopefully the cost will be reasonable so that a large majority of beekeepers are able take advantage of it.
Thanks Cory And Kaira for cleaning my mind of some thoughts I had before this video keep em coming yall THANK YALL and again thanks for the hard work very much appreciated!!!!
Western Australia: ive been looking for a way to check higene behaviour and it was all to hard ,but you've seemingly gone beyond that and now with varroa mites breathing down our necks in australia, this way of breading toward resistance is a Godsend especially as the test is a one day complete process. We typically drive for at least an hour to our bee site's ,im also glad you have a commercial interest ,You have a fine mind to envision the potentials of what you have ,it is so encouraging especialy after watching Ian Stepplers last vidio
I agree Bruce. Very useful. One advantage I considered is not getting false positives from recent miticide applications on a Harbo assay. It would be a non-issue with UBO.
I really enjoyed the discussion on FKB vs spray. I've been using the FKB test to help me quickly identify the colonies that I perform VSH assays on. They're certainly linked in some way and rather than having to run VSH assays on 40 colonies I can narrow that down to 10 or less and have seen great results, generally by the 5th colony I already have a 4. The thing that really gets my goat is when I just don't find any mites... Been thinking about getting a few colonies that are not resistant at all so i can manually add mites into the mix.
I love not finding mites, but it does make scoring them more labor intensive on a Harbo assay. It would concern me more, but the colonies were not treated the year before, so it’s not like they’re absent. Just controlled.
@@stevensbeeco767 Agreed, like you I don’t treat cause that defeats the whole purpose of a harbo assay. I tend to just assign an “inconclusive” to colonies that don’t produce any mites after 200 and will re-assay them at a later date. They could either be amazing or just lucky and that doesn’t sit well with me. I’ve seen a few that scored a 2 or 3 on successive assays and that bothers me but for the most part I have no trouble finding a handful of 4’s so I tend to not care about the others. I’ll be doing II for the first time this spring and hope that it will give me more consistency among the F1 daughters. Going to have to find more 4’s for the drones this season which should be fun.
So excited about this spray! For the past 5 years I have been interested in hygienic and VSH traits. I started a yard at my house with what was claimed to be “Minnesota Hygienic” bees then each year I have been buying and introducing a handful of VSH queens to this yard. Last year I purchased from Steven’s bee company, which by the way amazing customer service. But each year my winter survival rate has improved and I only do 1 round of oxalic acid vapor a year. I can’t wait to add this spray to the mix to focus my grafting more efficiently. Instead of just grafting from my best looking VSH survivor queens that I purchased the year before.
This is one of the most interesting utubes ive seen .I had hives with old combs with bad bald brood i guessed chemical may have been the cause. Working to have all newish brood combs.
Thinking toward commercialization, an app to track hives, do assay counts through the camera, and catalog the results would be awesome. Just like you keyed in on the recapping behavior in the pictures, having that photo history could aide future research. You can never have too many pictures and pulling all that geographic data into a central database could really help the community see trend data regionally.
I’m stoked to see more virus data too! Maybe we can chat about that when it’s out? That is a massive and often overlooked advantage to VSH or “ultra hygienics” that I’ve noticed through the years. Extremely low (undetectable) DWV expression on the colony level, even without miticide application.
I have enjoyed my bees this would have been my 5th Year last year I build up 50 house I can't say exactly what happened I had a massive kill off and went into them look good 2 weeks later I noticed the b count just in my yard wasn't right out of 40 halves I had three
I was going to ask why the ones that done really good always wanted to be hard on The beekeeper and the four colonies I have left they have been hard on me at times but I've noticed it's usually when there's lacking food in the environment like it's nothing's coming in you ain't going in
I can't remember where I saw this, but the mother mite poops just under the capping and that's what the nurse bees smell to trigger the uncapping process and you'll always find the white spot of mite poop @ 10 o'clock and the shed pupae casing @ 5 o'clock, you guys have looked in many many cells after the bees have removed the infected pupae, is this a true statement?
Have you worked with ph levels? Just wondered if there was something to feed the bees that would make the mites drop off that just changes the ph level enough to knock the mites off but not hurt the bees?