[Bonus] Short: Varroa Treatments - HopGuard 3

[Bonus] Short - Varroa Treatment Options: HopGuard 3

Jeff Ott: Welcome to Beekeeping Today Podcast short, 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, everybody. Welcome to this Beekeeping Today Podcast short 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'll be discussing HopGuard. Hey, Becky. Hey, David.

Dr. David Peck: Hey. How's it going?

Jeff: Oh, just hopping right along. How about that? No.

[laughter]

David: Oh, that's a bad start.

Jeff: I know. Sorry.

Becky: Oh, no.

David: Well, let's talk about HopGuard.

Becky: Let's go there. I've actually never used it, so I'm interested to hear what you're going to say, David.

David: Jeff, you said that you'd used it, right?

Jeff: Yes, I used it.

David: You weren't sure which one you'd used.

Jeff: Yes. I don't know which one I used. I think I used either the original HopGuard formulation or HopGuard 1. I can't remember which one. It was quite a while ago.

David: That's really important to say right at the outset, is that this is a product that has had a lot of different-- It's gotten some facelifts over time. We had HopGuard 1, then we had HopGuard 2. Now we've got HopGuard 3, which is the currently registered version. They've changed pretty significantly between them. The first strips were goopy and gloopy, and the second strips were less goopy and gloopy, and the third strips are still a little bit goopy and gloopy, but substantially less than the earlier incarnations.

Jeff: Well, what is HopGuard? It sounds like something you put down on a bar underneath your class.

Becky: Like an IPA.

Jeff: Yes. Under your IPA.

David: You're not wrong, because the reason it's called HopGuard is that the active ingredient is hops beta acids, which are derived from the hops flour, which is also used to flavor IPAs, beers, and what have you. They're safe to use with your honey supers in place because the only active ingredient that will get into your honey is going to be something that you can also get from drinking a beer after a day of beekeeping. The FDA doesn't think that that's a horrifying contaminant of honey, although obviously, you wouldn't want to change the flavor. That's one of the reasons that you don't put it in your supers. You just put it down in the brew boxes, but it is approved for use with the honey supers in place in the hive.

Jeff: Oh, it is. You can use HopGuard with the honey supers in place.

David: Yes.

Becky: David, does it leave any trace in the comb?

David: Well, the parts of the comb that touch it, in my experience, certainly will be affected by having been in contact with the strip. I don't know how long any residues might remain. I don't think it's terribly long-lasting. Generally, like most things, the bees will sort it out and clean it out once the HopGuard strip has been removed.

Jeff: You're saying it's an organically-derived product. How is it applied?

David: It, like many of these products, is a strip. It's a cardboard or cardboard-like strip that is saturated in the formula, which includes these hops beta acids. You open up the package, and hopefully your package is relatively cool, because the warmer it gets, the runnier it gets. Of all the things that we've talked about, many of them say you need to wear gloves when you apply. This one, only a lunatic would think to stick their hand into that container without gloves on, because you can tell it's going to be a messy process.

You have these strips that are soaked in the goo, and then you lower them down in between the frames of your brood boxes. Number of strips is determined by the number of frames of bees that you've got. If you've got one to five frames of bees, it's one strip. If you've got 6 to 10, it's 2, so on and so forth. For every five frames of bees, you add another one of the strips up to four for a double-deep colony. You just have to be very, very careful lowering those strips down into the hive, because as they go down, any bee that is touched by that goo is not going to fare well.

In general, you're going to kill the bees that physically touch it right as it's dropping down. If you happen to cram it down in between your brood frames and run it right over the back of your queen, you can get yourself in some big trouble. As long as you go slow and steady, the bees are going to be able to smell it coming, and they don't want to get hit by it. You can generally lower it slowly and gently, and you'll wind up with a good insertion into the brood nest, and then you leave it there for the course of the treatment.

Becky: Is it recommended to smoke the bees down first?

David: The label doesn't make any mention of it. In my experience, there's no need to really move the bees one way or another, although there's no downside in throwing in a little bit of smoke to get them out of the way of the strips as they're incoming, because the goal is simply to avoid hitting a bee right on the forehead with this sticky HopGuard stuff.

Jeff: How does it work?

David: We don't know. Like a number of these miticides, particularly like a lot of the organic acid miticides, of which this is one, we simply don't know the mechanism of action. We don't know how it kills mites. We know it does. We don't know how it doesn't kill bees, but it doesn't unless they touch it. We use it because it works. This is a common problem with a new pest like Varroa, something that erupted onto the beekeeping scene, and then we desperately needed tools to fight it.

When we find something that works and is safe and doesn't kill the bees, it's not that important exactly how it kills the mites. We, at this point, don't know definitively and conclusively what it's doing to them, but it does kill them.

Jeff: Because we didn't discuss this. We talked about wearing gloves only because it's a goopy mess. I think that was the scientific term you used, right? Goopy mess.

David: Maybe. That may not be what the manufacturer prefers people call it, but that's, I think, the most practical way to explain it.

Jeff: It did have the consistency of thick molasses. Respirator or no respirator?

David: No respirator. They recommend protective eyewear and a face shield and a long sleeve shirt, and pants, just as most of the miticides do, just so you don't splash anything on your skin or into your eyes or into your mouth or anything. They do not require a respirator. There's no harmful fumes that you're going to be subject to as you're dosing your colonies with it.

Becky: Jeff, you said you've used this before. Can you smell it when you open up the package and put it in?

Jeff: Definitely, I could smell it. I don't want to say it smells like a beer, but you can tell it's hoppy.

Becky: Hoppy, okay.

Jeff: Yes. It definitely has an odor, but it's not offensive. It's not like knock you backwards like formic. Are there any limitations in outside temperatures when you use this product?

David: Yes. It's recommended to use it when the bees are not in a tight cluster, so above 55 degrees Fahrenheit and then below 100 degrees Fahrenheit. It's not like formic where as soon as you get to 101, we've really got to start worrying about serious consequences. As the colony gets warmer and warmer and warmer, and they're spending their time trying to keep themselves cool and thermoregulate, you don't want them fighting against dealing with the miticide or fanning its fumes around or things like that. 55 degrees to 100 degrees is the recommended application rate.

Becky: I'm just going to clarify so that people know, to not confuse it. When you said it's not like formic, you meant it's not like the formic restrictions, where if you go above theirs, but formic is not 100.

David: Right. That's correct. We've got to follow the label, and the label says what to do, and then you do what the label says. If you violate the formic acid label, the consequences are particularly dire because the upper temperature limit harm to the bees is really dramatic. Whereas that's less the case for something like HopGuard is.

Becky: I just want to make sure that the listeners know that the formic limit is what, 85?

David: 85 Fahrenheit. Correct. Thank you. One thing I guess we should really say here is that there is a downside to HopGuard. Like a number of these miticides, it does not penetrate the brood caps and therefore it does not control a lot of the mites in the hive. HopGuard, of the studies that have been done, it doesn't stack up very well against other miticides, especially if you're using it when there is brood. It just doesn't kill as many mites as some of the other active ingredients and some of the other formulations do.

You can use it with supers in place, but if your bees are raising brood, you're going to knock your mites down some, but you're probably not going to knock them down as hard as you might with other miticides because even the maximum published efficacies with HopGuard 3 are not quite as good as you get from some other miticides.

Jeff: It's most effective during broodless or brood breaks, broodless periods such as--

David: Ideally, yes. Catch a swarm or brood breaks that you've engineered, or if you've got a low brood period, but it's still within those temperature limits, all of those would be times to maybe reach for the HopGuard 3.

Jeff: I don't want to say that it doesn't sound as effective, but compared to the other treatment options in this series that are available to beekeepers, this does not seem to be high on the effective list.

David: I don't recommend it that often. It's not that it doesn't do what it claims to do, but it is not the most effective miticide, and it's also not the cheapest miticide. For a beekeeper who doesn't want the smell of formic and doesn't want to use synthetic pesticides like Apivar, there's a place for something like HopGuard. It is a relatively expensive and not incredibly potent and effective miticide. It's an important tool in the toolkit, but it's not the weapon I'd reach for first.

Becky: David, is it helpful if you want some control, but you also want to rotate different miticides so that you're preventing resistance?

David: Sure. Right. It's a different active ingredient and probably a different mechanism of action than many of the others, and so by using this in your rotation, it helps you tamp down the mite population while fighting against the emergence of resistance to any particular other active ingredient. Sure. Yes, within a rotation, it makes more sense than being the end-all be-all for somebody's mite control year-round, which it just isn't great at.

Becky: If your threshold is, say, 2% and you test and it's 5%, what are you going to grab?

David: Probably not HopGuard 3. If it's 2% and I test and it's 2%, then maybe I am comfortable reaching for this, because it's relatively gentle on the bees, it doesn't contaminate honey, it has some pros for sure to it. I could use it and get my mites down to 1.5%. Then that buys me some more time until I take the supers off, and then might reach for something else.

Becky: Excellent.

Jeff: All right. There you go. HopGuard 3, a tool to consider in your IPM rotation of treatment options against Varroa.

David: Absolutely.

[00:11:37] [END OF AUDIO]