While checking the monitoring board today, something caught my eye that I’d heard about but had never actually seen until today: a small ant, right in the middle of the debris, with a small reddish-brown something clamped between its mandibles - suspiciously the right size and color for a Varroa mite.
The monitoring board sits under the mesh floor and normally serves a very specific purpose: after the Varroa treatment in late summer, I slide it in, wait a few days, and then count the natural mite drop. From that number you can roughly estimate how heavily a colony is infested with Varroa and whether the treatment worked - or whether another round is needed. Along the way you see more than just mites - wax crumbs, bits of pollen, bee body parts, wax moth droppings, and plenty more. A science of its own. Well worth watching on this topic is a talk by Wolfhard S. Hüsken, which I go back to whenever I find something new on my monitoring boards.
And clearly, there are visitors from outside too. The ant had come in through one of the gaps around the monitoring board and, from the look of it, helped itself. Ants doing this is well documented in the literature - but none of my colleagues at the beekeeping association had ever actually seen it. Well, now I have proof. I wasn’t fast enough with video mode, though - there was a second ant, and it had dragged off a Varroa mite that was still alive, its little legs paddling helplessly in the air …
In my beekeeping course I learned that you’re supposed to put a sheet of paper towel on the monitoring board and soak it in olive oil - that’s meant to stop ants from dragging the mites off, so you get an accurate count. It doesn’t really work for me either, though - the ants couldn’t care less about the olive oil, they just walk right over it. Maybe because my olive oil is organic-certified too. Which leaves the powdered sugar method - I’ll write up my experience with that in one of my next posts.