Treb, white/sweet clover is one of the best honey making flowers in the midwest. When the white flowers show up in your yard, you know the bees are making honey. When they dry up when it gets too hot, you're not.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019...t-deadly-mites
verroa mites are a threat to honey bees for sure, but there are ways to control them in colonies if you're watching/testing. A lot of the big boys use an alcohol wash, where they take a half cup(300 bees) and wash them with rubbing alcohol(which does kill them) and then do a mite count. They'll use the findings of that to determine if treatment is necessary. There are several chemical products and "strips" that treat for mites....and vaporizing oxalic acid to fumigate the mites. You can really only do this when there aren't honey supers on the hives. I'll fume mine after I pull off honey at the end of August.
From what I understand some species and hybrids are more hygenic and better at dealing with them naturally. They spread by going down into a cell with a new egg and attaching to larvae, so once I have no larvae in a hive they're basically no longer an issue for those bees. I am concerned that they may have spread to some other hives, but I'll treat them in early September and move on.
I was talking to a guy who has 3500-4000 hives and he's the one that immediately identified my mean bees as having Verroa. I guess they're just agitated from having the mites on them, I suppose like having a leach on your balls or something would make you grouchy. In my case, they were mean as hell when I got them, stayed mean, and they've not accepted new queen cells even when they don't have a queen. I'm just going to let these old bitches build comb and honey until they die out. I've got enough bees caught that it's not a loss other than the 9 hours and 50+ stings I've got invested in the colony.......I'll freeze the honey(and they're making a lot) and then use it to strengthen up some of the swarm hives to get them producing, or for resources for late swarms I might get.
I've been threatening to do it, and I've got most of the materials to try a horizontal hive. I'm planning to build 1-2 of these over the next couple of nights and put one of the colonies I have in traps in it and see how it goes.
https://horizontalhive.com/how-to-bu...th-plans.shtml