Post Updated on March 15, 2019

Mercury Island Project

The research project was conducted by a team which was led by Dr Mark Goodwin and Michelle Taylor both of which are the writers/authors of the book “Control of Varroa – A Guide for New Zealand Beekeepers” and who work for the Plant and Food Research Institute of New Zealand Ltd (By the way Mark states that he and Michelle do not receive any royalties for the “Control of Varroa” book.)

Mark was the first speaker of the team. He started by saying he was working on “Chemical Resistant Varroa in NZ”.

Unfortunately results are showing that synthetic treatments used in the fight against varroa are not continuing to be effective, a trend which has occurred overseas as well. Therefore his conclusion being that varroa are now resistant to synthetic treatments and that “…we could no longer trust synthetic treatments…”

He quoted a case of a beekeeper getting 100% kill rate of Varroa mites with Apistan in the year 2000 and this has dropped to 20% in the year 2010.

His approach going forward?
– Alternate different types of treatments
– treat regularly – don’t wait
– always check mite levels before (NMF) and after treatments
– re-treat with another type of treatment if unsuccessful

Going Organic
Using acids;
– Oxalic
– formic

Other methods to use?
– Drone trapping
– Meshboards

In other words use an IPM program being an “Integrated Pest Management Program“.

Have a listen to the speech yourself, what do you think please comment below:-

The fifth podcast from the team at Kiwimana HQ. This is a speech from Dr Mark Goodwin about “Varroa Resistance”.

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