Natural mite drop

The Varroa tray underneath an open mesh floor (OMF) provides a non-invasive insight into colony state and activity and, to a lesser extent, health.

State and activity include things like whether the colony is expanding or contracting, whether it is rearing brood, clustered, using winter stores etc.

The principle could not be simpler … you insert the Varroa tray, wait a period of days, remove it and examine the hive debris that has fallen through the mesh.

Depending upon the your imagination detective skills, the quality of your floor/tray, the time of the season, your location, the state of your colony (expanding, broodless etc.) and its health, you can see all sorts of things … some of which are more or less interpretable.

Pollen, chalkbrood mummies, dark-coloured wax cappings, pale or white wax cappings, Varroa, Braula, mouse droppings, legs, wings and antennae {{1}}.

You might also find sticky pools of semi-liquid fondant, slugs, dead bees, live ants, hibernating wasps or surprised mice.

There may be a distinct pattern to the debris, or it might be randomly scattered across the Varroa board.

Before tackling the primary topic of this post – natural mite drop {{2}} – I’ll make a couple of semi-related observations on the floor itself and on some of the things other than Varroa you sometimes find on the Varroa tray.