2024 Field Report: Mites and Winter Survival

We want to share the results of our 2024 field report with everyone in hopes that our transparency will instill confidence in your decision to work with us.

We answer a lot of correspondence with interested beekeepers about the state of our bee yards. We summarized our most common questions into this brief 2024 field report to help provide the answers easier. We hope this data satisfies your curiosity and peaks your interest into our stock and Northern VSH queens.

Early Spring, More Mites?

We use the results from our alcohol washes in August on all our colonies and our overwinter survival as a barometer of the overall success of the operation. We don’t use any mite treatments on our colonies during the season until we have completed these counts. On average, 75% of our stock goes untreated the entire year. For 2024, 70% of our colonies went untreated all year. In the 2024 season we experienced slightly higher than our average mite counts (2.25 vs 2 mites per 5/5 nuc). This could be due to the early spring with first pollen entering the colonies almost a month ahead of the 2025 season. Overall, the mites did not have us worried in 2024 within our operation.

Overwinter Survival

We winter all our colonies outdoors here in Wisconsin. Our predominant winter vehicle of choice is the 5/5  nuc, but we do use some other styles. Our overwinter survival for the 2024-2025 season was 80%. This is lower than our average in the past years. We aren’t blaming the bees for this one though. This was 100% a poor management decision on our part. We put some colonies into winter that were not large enough to survive this more aggressive winter we received. If we had a milder winter like last year, they would have likely survived. We saw that February was the decider month for bee survival. To put it in perspective, the bees didn't even have temps high enough for a cleansing flight until the last few days of the month. We could see how our management choices reflected in our yards where we were more aggressive with the combining of questionable colonies. These yards had an overwinter survival of 89-91%. There are benefits though of losing 20% percent overwinter and that is the availability of woodenware and drawn comb. When you have 90% survival or higher, everything becomes a scramble to keep the bees in their boxes. Our nation has faced the worst year in honey bee survival during the 2024-2025 season with almost 70% of managed colonies being lost. So, for us to walk away with 80% of our colonies alive still, we are doing OK.

The Numbers And Our Thoughts

Here is a brief summary of our takeaways for the 2024 season:

5/5 nucs – Average of 2.25 mites in a 300 bee sample

•       Counting the bee samples afterwards and some samples contained 350 to 450 bees. Consistency is key.

10/10 colonies – Average of 5 mites in a 300 bee sample

•        Colonies split more frequently and later in the season contained more mites.

•        Are these mites reproductive or not? Does that matter or are all mites a sign of doom?

Takeaways

•       More research is needed as to how splitting large colonies affects mite growth and VSH behavior.

•       Horizontal mite transmission is always a possible factor. How do we identify this?

The 2025 Field Season Is Coming Fast!

We have identified a few research opportunities we would like to pursue into the 2025 season from this list. We have spent the winter contemplating these issues and many others. We are very excited to take on some of these questions and share our results with all of you. As always, we love to hear the overwinter results from our readers! Please share with us what you are working on and your experiences using our stock.