Queen Isolation Cage 240

1. Varroa control

From mid-Spring to mid-Summer, 75% of the varroa mites in a hive can be breeding inside the capped brood cells and are protected from most varroa treatments.

By creating a brood break, all the varroa mites are exposed and can be killed with 1–3 cents worth of Oxalic Acid by vaporisation.

Procedure

1. Cage the queen for 18 days.
2. Release her and wait 6 days.
3. Then you will have 2 days where there will be no capped brood.
4. Vaporise the beehive with Oxalic Acid and kill almost every varroa mite inside.

Most commercial queen breeders will mark queens for no extra charge. That makes them very easy to find to allow for quick caging and very low cost varroa control.

2. Swarm control

Cage the queen in Spring to control swarming and varroa mite populations.

There are 3 stages that usually precede swarming:

1. Build excess amounts of drone brood.
2. Build queen cell cups.
3. Add eggs to cell cups to produce new queens.

The procedure is best performed during the first or second stage.

Procedure

1. Cage the queen for 18 days.
2. Release her and wait 6 days.
3. Then you will have 2 days where there will be no capped brood. Vaporise the beehive with Oxalic Acid and kill almost every varroa mite inside.
4. 18 days with no eggs makes the bees forget about swarming for a while.

It is important to time this procedure to maximise field bee numbers at the start of the honey flow.

3. To maximise a honey crop

Some honey flows can be very valuable but occur for an intense and brief period of only 2 or 3 weeks.

To maximise the crop, cage the queen 2 or 3 days before the start of the expected honey flow. This allows for the following:

• The queen excluder can be removed.
• 8 days after caging, there will be no brood to feed.
• More bees get involved in field duties to maximise the crop.
• Less food and pollen required in the brood nest.
• Very few foragers collect pollen. They focus on the honey crop.
• No chance of getting brood in the honey supers.

The honey crop can then be removed, queen released, and the hive can be vaporised with Oxalic Acid to kill virtually all the varroa mites in the hive.

4. Requeening with cells

Put the old queen into the cage when adding a queen cell. Check the hive 24 days later to see if there is a new laying queen.

If not, the old queen can be let out to continue laying. If there is a good new queen, the old queen can be removed.

There is likely to be no capped brood, so the hive can be vaporised with Oxalic Acid to kill virtually every varroa mite in the hive.

5. Over winter

Beehives in good condition in Autumn will greatly benefit from a brood break in the winter.

If you have hives in a location where this doesn’t happen, you can do it with an isolation cage.

The bees that hatch out after you cage the queen will live happily until the next batch of brood arrives several months later, after the brood break period.

The queen can be caged for 3 to 4 months without any detrimental effects to her health or performance.

24 days after caging, there will be no capped brood and the hive can be vaporised with Oxalic Acid.

If done with the correct technique, it will kill virtually every varroa mite in the beehive. There is no capped brood for them to shelter in.

Another treatment one week later is recommended to wipe out any possible varroa mite remnants.

Varroa mites can potentially turn up from stray bees from other colonies, but they cannot breed when there is no brood.

Winter brood break advantages

The temperature in the cluster will drop from 34°C to around 22°C to 28°C. With the lower temperature and no brood, there are significant advantages such as:

1. A lot less honey required in the winter.
2. A lot less pollen is required.
3. The worker bees and the queen live a lot longer because they have very little work to do.
4. There is less condensation in the beehive.
5. The timber stays dryer and lasts longer.
6. Only one box of bees is required over winter.
7. Easier to keep secure in case of storms or floods.

No varroa strips will be required in the beehive unless you have massive varroa mite re-invasion issues from nearby colonies.

Caging the queens in the first week of April and releasing in the last week of July worked very well on some trial beehives in the Nelson region in 2023.

The queens went crazy and laid a lot of eggs very fast. A month later, there were lots of beautiful big frames of very healthy brood.

When the queens are released, the hive can be vaporised with Oxalic Acid so that if there are any varroa mites present, they are virtually all killed.