Counting mites

The cool weather has meant I haven't been able to check the bees properly although I have managed to get to Scald End and put supers on all the hives.

With the swarming season creeping up I need to do some preparatory work, particularly finding and marking the queens although the cool weather seems to extend into next week.

I've blogged about varroa before but to recap:-
Varroa is a mite that originated in Asia and has spread to every country in the world. Asian bees have a degree of resistance but our bees don't.

They lay their eggs in with the bee eggs and when they hatch they attach themselves to the bees.

Varroa mite

They stick a spike into the bee and drink their haemolymph [blood]. They drain out all the nutrients and also pass on diseases like Deformed Wing Virus.
This weakens the colony that can eventually die and varroa is at least as bigger threat as environment, weather, pesticides etc.
You cannot get rid of varroa and the best you can do is to try and reduce the mite load. There are numerous ways of doing this.

 A bee keeper should try and monitor the varroa level in the hives and the usual way is to have a varroa floor under the hive.
This is just a floor with a wire mesh so all the rubbish and mites that fall off the bees drops through the mesh onto a plastic sheet called a sticky board. Its coated with something sticky [I use cooking oil] to stop the mites walking away.

The boards are left in the hive for three days and the mites counted.
The mites are small and my eyesight isn't good enough to easily count them. A magnifying glass is an alternative but I  use a mini camera attached to my laptop so I can look at the laptop screen rather than peer through a magnifying glass.The board is divided into four sections I can count each separately so I don't lose track of where I am.
However I recently made something that hopefully will make the process easier.

This is how I count the mites