[Bonus] Short: Varroa Treatments - ApiLife Var and Apiguard

[Bonus] Short - Varroa Treatment Options: ApiLife Var and Apiguard

Jeff Ott: Welcome to Beekeeping Today Podcast Shorts, your quick dive into the latest buzz in beekeeping.

Becky Masterman: In 20 minutes or less, we'll bring you one important story, keeping you informed and up to date.

Jeff: No fluff, no fillers, just the news you need.

Becky: Brought to you by Betterbee, your partners in better beekeeping.

Jeff: Hey everyone, welcome to this Beekeeping Today Podcast Shorts on Varroa Treatments. This is a multi-part series covering the different treatment options available to combat this honey bee pest. Each short in the series will cover one specific treatment option. For the series, we've invited Dr. David Peck from Betterbee to join us. In this short, we will be discussing ApiLife Var and Apiguard.

Hey Becky, hey David.

David Peck: Hey, how's it going? Thanks for having me back.

Jeff: Always enjoyable to have you with us, David.

Becky: Looking forward to this discussion.

David: This is going to be a fun one. I think to begin, because we're talking about ApiLife Var and Apiguard, we should start by agreeing on the pronunciation of the active ingredient. Both of these products are based on a molecule called thymol, but I call it thymol because it's derived from the herb thyme. Some people call it thymol because it's spelled T-H-Y-M-O-L. If anyone says that, I think they're dumb.

[laughter]

No, both of those pronunciations are fine. I only say thymol because I know what the herb is called and I know where it comes from, but there are lots and lots of folks who call it thymol. We're all just going to have to agree to get along with each other and let both of those be acceptable pronunciations.

Becky: Not call each other dumb?

[laughter]

David: Yes, fine. Sounds good.

Becky: Goodness, I call it thymol. Oh, thymol, I mean.

[laughs]

David: Right. We've got these two different products. One of them, the Apiguard, is a gel that has thymol in it. Then the other one, ApiLife Var, is a wafer. That contains thymol, but it also has eucalyptus oil, menthol, and actually also has camphor in it, which is another plant-derived compound. Although in the US, that's not listed as one of the active ingredients, in other countries it is listed as one of the active ingredients. It's that mixture of the different essential oils and plant derivatives that goes into the ApiLife Var. That's different from the Apiguard, which is just the thymol. Nice and simple.

Jeff: Thanks for the description. I have not used these, so this is a learning discussion for me. I'll ask some of these very basic questions.

David: Yes. Go for it.

Jeff: Is there any difference in action between these two products? Are they essentially the same, and can we talk about them in the same breath as the same product?

David: I think it's reasonable to lump them together because they both use as their core the thymol, and the thymol is doing probably most of the heavy lifting. The ApiLife Var is 75%, 74% thymol. That is the majority of the active ingredient in it. The Apiguard gel itself is only 25% thymol, but that's because it's behaving in a different way. The other ingredients, the other active essential oils in the ApiLife Var are probably contributing to killing the mites, but they're not really the drivers of mite control.

Then applying them, they have a lot of the same restrictions. Both of these products can not be applied with supers in place because they will stink your honey up something terrible. Both of these are pretty gentle on the bees. The bees don't like the smell of thymol, but it doesn't do much harm to them. They are both good for mite control, but they need to be reapplied because they don't penetrate the brood caps. Both of these products have instructions that will have you going out and re-upping the dose that you've put into the hive so that you're able to make sure that all of the mites wind up getting exposed.

Jeff: The product that you said is kind of a gel, the Apiguard, does that evaporate then through time?

David: It doesn't really. It seems like a lot of its mechanism involves the bees getting up and trying to remove the gel from the hive. There's some evaporation of the thymol, but there's also just thymol getting on the bees as they're grabbing it and pulling it and scraping it and running around and bumping into each other.

Whereas the ApiLife Var, that's all evaporation. It basically forms a vapor. The mixture of the different essential oils means that it has a lower overall boiling point than if it was just pure thymol. That lower boiling point means that it forms a vapor inside of the hive and then drips down and bubbles down through it and hits the mites wherever they happen to be.

Jeff: Are these applied on top of the frames then? They're heavier than air. The vapors are heavier than air and drift down and out.

David: Exactly. The ApiLife Var comes as these little wafers and you break them into four roughly equally sized pieces. You don't have to stress about it. Then put those four pieces up in the corners of your top brood box. Then they form that vapor and it drifts down throughout the rest of the hive. The Apiguard can be applied two different ways depending upon how you buy it. In both cases, you're putting it up at the top of your top brood box.

You can buy Apiguard either as a great big 6.6-pound tub of the gel. Then for that, what you're going to do is you have these little cardboard cards, basically, like an extra large business card or something. You're going to, wearing your protective gear, slurp out 51 milliliters of the stuff and squirt it down onto the card and then set that on top of the hive. This is really built for large-scale beekeepers, commercial beekeepers who are trying to put a whole bunch of this stuff cheaply into their hives.

The other application involves these little foil packs. I always say that they look like little cans of Fancy Feast, like cat food. It's a little foil pack with a little foil lid. You peel off the foil lid and then you've got this little aluminum tray full of the Apiguard gel. You can just set one of those trays right on top of your hive and the bees will go up and say, "Hey, this stuff stinks. Let's get into it and pull at it and scrape at it and lick at it and move it all around." In both cases, that winds up distributing the active ingredient the thymol throughout the hive.

Becky: David, I haven't used them for a while, but I thought that with the Fancy Feast pack, you would have to put a spacer up there to accommodate for that extra depth.

David: Yes, you generally do. It's a pretty low profile. I know that Betterbee does sell an extra-large inner cover. There are some designs of hive equipment that will allow for that extra space. If you don't have that, a regular inner cover is probably going to cause trouble. You'll be a lot happier if you put a shim in place.

Becky: Okay.

Jeff: Do we know how this works?

David: What a great question. Like most miticides, not really. We don't know exactly how the thymol and the other ingredients kill the mites. Like most of these, it seems like it involves that very thin mite exoskeleton, skin for want of a better word, on their feet. It seems like it penetrates there. It may interrupt their breathing. It may disrupt some other part of their biology. It could be that it's actually interacting with the chemical sensors. The mite's ability to smell their way around their world, and then because the mites are stumbling around, unable to navigate, that gives the bees a chance to bite their faces off and throw them down onto the bottom boards.

We don't know exactly how this works. Again, it doesn't matter as long as it kills mites. It's not critical to know how it works in order to be able to use it safely and effectively.

Becky: I was going to say, David, is it a good time to maybe revisit the fact that one of the ways these might work is just the scale of it? The mite is smaller than the bee, and you're not putting in enough to harm the bee, but the dose is harmful to the mite? Is that fair?

David: Yes. What's the old saying? The poison is in the dose or something like that. The more of something you consume, almost anything can be toxic. Bees have the advantage of being bigger than mites. Ideally, you'll use a chemical that the mites are more sensitive to than the bees are in general. Also, just the fact that the mites are smaller and a little more delicate means that something that's a little bit noxious to everybody, in the hive, is going to hurt the mites more than it hurts the bees.

That's certainly the principle for something like formic acid, which we know kills bees at higher concentrations, and that's why you only use the right concentration of it in order to kill the mites and not the bees.

Jeff: What about temperature dependencies for these products?

David: You need to be mindful of that for both of them. The ApiLife VAR needs to be put in when the temperatures are above 54 degrees Fahrenheit. It's generally recommended that if you use it above 95 degrees Fahrenheit, you anticipate more brood mortality or bee mortality. The minimum temperature is 55 degrees Fahrenheit, and then the maximum temperature is 95 degrees Fahrenheit.

Above 95, you can start to see bees and broods starting to die. Then below it, you're just not going to have good circulation of the vapors, and the bees can get overwhelmed because if they're in a tight cluster, they aren't going to be able to circulate the vapors and vent them out of the hive as needed.

Jeff: With both of these, is there bee bearding, as we see in formic acid?

David: Yes. Bearding should be expected with both of them because, again, this is not a smell the bees enjoy. It's not going to kill the whole colony, but they're certainly going to go, "Oof. It stinks in here." They will generally, if possible, take themselves out on the front porch to air out a little bit.

The temperature regulations for the Apiguard are a little bit different there. There's actually an interesting opportunity with the Apiguard because it allows you to use these different application methods depending upon the temperature.

For the Apiguard, the maximum temperature that you can use it at is 105 degrees Fahrenheit. The minimum temperature is 60 degrees Fahrenheit. Not quite the same as the ApiLife Var, but both roughly in the same ballpark. What's interesting about the Apiguard is that they have a little modification in the dosing based on the temperature. If it's between 60 degrees and 77 degrees, then you use your full dose. If it is between 77 degrees and the maximum of 105 degrees, then they recommend that you use a half dose.

The warmer it is outside, the more the bees are affected by the dosage that you give them. You can cut the dosage down and you can reduce the harm to the bees and still effectively expose the mites to it. That's a neat little flexibility that Apiguard has built into its label, which most of the other products don't have. That if it's 60 to 77 degrees Fahrenheit, use the full dose. If it's 77 to 105 degrees Fahrenheit, you use the half dose.

That just gives beekeepers a little more flexibility because obviously we can't control the weather and we can't control what time of year, what day we need to start doing our mite treatments. It can be useful to be able to have that flexibility built into the label.

Jeff: Did we talk about how long the treatment period is?

David: No, we didn't. That's important. That's another point that's different for the two products. For the ApiLife Var, for the wafers that you're snapping apart and putting up in the top, you're going to do three applications. The first application, you put this in and then you leave the strips in, or rather, the tablets in for seven to 10 days. It's up to you. You can choose what you want to do. Then you come back and do your second application, which you do for another seven to 10 days.

Then you do your third application, and that stays in for 12 days. Depending upon how you choose to do your timing there, and that's nice. You have some flexibility. Hey, maybe it's raining. Maybe you're a little busy on seven days after, so you'll go in eight days after and do the next dose. Essentially, roughly every week to 10 days, you're going in and putting in a new dose so that you wind up exposing every mite to it. All the mites that are in the brood are going to wind up getting exposed.

That's those treatments. It's the three applications, seven to 10 days apart for the first two, and then the last one stays in for 12, and then you scrape out the residue, and then your treatment is done.

For the Apiguard, whether you're using the great big tub of the stuff or the little aluminum trays, what you'll wind up doing is leaving it in for a minimum of four weeks or a maximum of six weeks. You put your first dose in, two weeks later, you put your second dose in, two weeks later, you check it. Then if there's still more, you can leave it for an additional two weeks unless you need to put your supers on, and then you can pull it out and then put the supers right in place.

That's different than the ApiLife Var which does recommend that you not put any supers onto the colony for about a month after you finish the treatment. That is really handy in the fall when you're going in doing a fall treatment, and then you're not going to put supers on for months anyway, so it's not a big deal. That's not something that's terribly useful in the spring because now I've got to get this thing in, do about three or more weeks of application. Then I need a month before I can super up, and for most people, that just doesn't make a lot of sense.

It's a really good treatment for colonies in the fall, or a broodless colony, a colony that for whatever reason isn't making honey for you. If it's a colony that you plan to super up and get honey from, ApiLife Var and Apiguard can both be a challenge to use effectively in most climates.

Jeff: Now for the big question, what's its effectiveness against Varroa?

David: They're both good. They're both high. They don't penetrate the brood caps, and so if you only use one application of thymol, you'll knock some mites down and some mites will be protected. Because these are getting reapplied and because thymol is a pretty effective molecule at killing mites, it does a very good job for mite control. As long as you're able to commit to the full treatment course, the two applications of Apiguard or the three applications of ApiLife Var.

Becky: David, one of the impacts of using Apiguard or ApiLife Var I think that beekeepers should know about is the fact that if you're testing comb for residue, thymol has been definitely found in comb where this has been used as a treatment.

David: Yes.

Becky: Whether or not that impacts the colony. I'm guessing that might impact the colony more, but I think it's important that that residue is there. You have to be really careful with where you're extracting honey from.

David: Yes. If you are a beekeeper who is sometimes using a frame in a brood box and sometimes using a frame in a super, maybe you've got deep supers, maybe you've got medium brood boxes, whatever it is, if you're mixing and matching frames, you can get yourself in trouble. Because a frame that was in a brood box and received one of these thymol treatments and then becomes a honey frame in another box in another year, that can still have a detectable residue which can leave a detectable off taste.

Again, I put a lot of time when I make soup, so it's not like it's a molecule that I'm afraid to have anywhere near my body. I don't want to have a pesticide, even if it's derived from a natural ingredient, getting into a product that I intend to eat or sell to somebody else. You do need to maintain that separation between combs that are exposed to the thymol and might have some residue and combs that are not exposed to it and will be safe.

Jeff: That's to say that you don't want to try to sell honey that says time-infused honey.

[chuckles]

David: I have attended a couple of state beekeeping meetings and as a speaker have been asked to judge the black jar honey contestant entries and have gone down the line and on a couple of them gone, "Oh, yes, that's that minty flavor that tells me that you used a thymol-based miticide in your hives." It's not a bad taste, but it's not a natural honey taste and it's not something that you want to be selling to your customers at the farmer's market.

Becky: Wait, Basswood tastes minty.

David: Yes, but not the way these guys taste minty.

[crosstalk]

I love Basswood honey, but this is, no.

Becky: I'm like, what are you talking about? [chuckles]

David: Yes. If you have the opportunity to taste honey that has been exposed to thymol and memorize that flavor, you will recognize it other times if people are being a little cavalier with some of their treatments. That's something we certainly want to recommend against.

Becky: I'm just guessing it taste medicinal a little bit.

David: Yes. It's a flavor that you will certainly notice. It's not horrible. It's honey that I'd eat, but it's honey that I'd prefer not to be sold.

Jeff: Well, here we go. ApiLife Var and Apiguard, two great options depending on the time of year and your requirements to include in your varroa treatment management strategy.

David: Absolutely. More weapons in the arsenal.

[00:17:47] [END OF AUDIO]