Breaking varroa brood cycle

[Vicken]

What are the practical methods for breaking varroa brood cycle?

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[Michael Bush]

Do you mean breaking the bees' brood cycle to help with Varroa?  Shortening the gestation cycle of the bee is the only way to disrupt the Varroa brood cycle.  Small cell would be the way to accomplish that.

http://www.bushfarms.com/beesnaturalcell.htm
http://www.bushfarms.com/beessctheories.htm

[Aroc]

Are there any studies on this Michael?  I have looked into it a bit....even brought it up in another discussion and was told it was mainly conjecture and that there were no real evidence that this works.  I would entertain the idea if I felt it worked.

[Michael Bush]

>Are there any studies on this Michael?

Male survivorship of Varroa on small cell:
http://www.apidologie.org/index.php?option=com_article&access=standard&Itemid=129&url=/articles/apido/pdf/2002/01/Martin.pdf

Varroa reproduction on small cell:
http://funpecrp.com.br/gmr/year2003/vol1-2/gmr0057_full_text.htm

http://www.beesource.com/point-of-view/hans-otto-johnsen/survival-of-a-commercial-beekeeper-in-norway/
http://scientificbeekeeping.com/trial-of-honeysupercell-small-cell-combs/

I measured pupation times in my observation hive on small cell and found it to be 19 days (8 days pre capping and 11 days post capping) as did Huber on natural cells and Dzierzon on natural cells (before the invention of foundation)

"The worm of workers passes three days in the egg, five in the vermicular state, and then the bees close up its cell with a wax covering. The worm now begins spinning its cocoon, in which operation thirty-six hours are consumed. In three days, it changes to a nymph, and passes six days in this form. It is only on the twentieth day of its existence, counting from the moment the egg is laid, that it attains the fly state."--Fran?ois Huber, New Observations on the Natural History Of Bees Volume I, Letter VIII 4 September 1791.
http://www.bushfarms.com/huber.htm#eggtoadult

"When the young worker-bee has left the cell ? which, reckoning from the egg, will be the case at the end of nineteen days, under favourable circumstances..."--Jan Dzierzon, Rational Bee-Keeping, 1882 English edition, Pg 20

And that would be modeled like this:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304380001004409

Bees have a longer lifespan on small cell:
http://medycynawet.edu.pl/images/stories/pdf/pdf2014/122014/201412777780.pdf

There have been some studies that show no difference in Varroa and those are discussed here:
http://www.elgon.se/pdf-filer/Small_cell_test_designs13c.pdf
http://beeuntoothers.com/index.php/bees/articles/8-small-cell-studies

But in the end, I don't find counting mites to be very helpful in determining success or failure.  I have not treated since regressing them to small cell, for Varroa for 13 years now.

"You don't grock the desert by counting the grains of sand."--Robert Heinlein, A Stranger in a Strange Land

"All the boring and soul-destroying work of counting mites on sticky boards, killing brood with liquid nitrogen, watching bees groom each other, and measuring brood hormone levels?all done in thousands of replications?will someday be seen as a colossal waste of time when we finally learn to let the Varroa mites do these things for us...
"I have never yet counted even a single sample of mites from any of my bees. I consider counting mites as a way of evaluating Varroa resistance to be fraught with all sorts of shortcomings and difficulties. It's very time consuming and hence the size of the apiary, the number of colonies tested, the gene pool, and the income available all start to shrink. It's also very easy for the results to be skewed by mites migrating from other colonies or bee yards. "?Kirk Webster ABJ April 2005, pg 314

http://kirkwebster.com/index.php/whats-missing-from-the-current-discussion-and-work-related-to-bees-thats-preventing-us-from-making-good-progress