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| Blower directed under tank. |
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| Blower details.
Mike added a second blower to help raise the temperature of our dip tank and it worked. The contents of our tank was ready to used within 2 hours, where it took almost 4 hours before adding the blowers. We go to a lot of yard sales, and we purchased these to move hot air through our home. I think they are also available at Granger.
The blowers are directed to blow air under the tank where the flame is. We actually had to turn down the heat, as it rapidly approached 400 degrees. Before the blowers, we had trouble keeping the tank at 350 degrees. We would have to stop, put the lid on and bring the temperature back up.
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| 2nd blower added inside still pipe. |
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| Looking at blower in pipe. |
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Randy Oliver asked me to chart on Excel, my varroa counts and times that we dusted with powdered sugar. I was able to put them together just prior to our meeting and Randy's program. During the program, Randy was explaining at what times of the year the varroa counts are accurate, which is only during brood rearing....as the brood emerges, the mites fall out and then you have accurate counts with the highest counts at the end of summer. During the fall into winter, most mites are phoretic and hanging onto the bees. You need an "amplified' sticky, which is a complete sugar dusting (See Randy's 8 Second Dusting Here) and then count mites to get accurate counts. I looked at my graft and you can clearly see, our counts from spring to autumn rising dramatically and then really low counts through winter (I didn't count our powdered sugar results, only 24 hour natural falls) and then rising again. The counts from our first year compared to our second year shows that repeated powdered sugar dustings really did knock back mites.
Chart below.
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| Hornet stalking bee on wax cappings left outside for bees to clean up |
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