Yesterday and today I made a second round of OA vapor treatments to my hives. I hadn't intended to give two treatments
(two weeks apart) but last week, when looking through the hives I spotted a varroa mite on the back of a worker in one of my hives and figured that maybe my treatment wasn't thorough enough. The reason for my thinking so is not only because of the mite I spotted but because, when vaporizing the hives, I didn't see any real quantities of OA vapor coming out and I thought that maybe the job wasn't done thoroughly enough. To be honest, both times I applied OA, I barely saw any vapor, if any at all, from most of the hives.
The only thing that I did really differently from the instructions I read and the videos I watched was that I used a car battery charger (not a battery) as my source of power. I put the settings on 24 V at Rapid charge rate. When I first tested these settings outside a hive to see how it worked, the OA powder vaporized nicely. When I removed the vaporizer from the hives, (after 5 minutes with currrent and a two minute waiting period before removal) the copper pan was pretty clean, with only a small amount of residue left behind.
Can any one put my mind at ease or make any suggestions?
One thing I can say with certainty about the OA treatment is that the bees seemed to be totally unfazed by it all. I opened two hives a few minutes after giving the treatment and behavior was completely normal---the bees were calmly going about their business as if nothing had been done to them at all.
Lee, I thank you for your brilliant suggestion about leaving the smoker nearby the hive so the direction of the smoke could warn you about the movement of the OA vapor.
