I did another 24 hour mite drop test today.

It revealed (1) varroa mite dropped from the white hive and (33) on the blue/purple hive.

Yikes!

I planned to do a powder sugar dusting today on both hives regardless of what the test results were, but now it seems I may need to do another followup test in a week to see how the numbers stand then for the blue/purple hive.

Anyways, if you've never done a powder sugar dusting, it's quite a lot of fun!



It only takes about 1 cup of powder sugar per deep hive body to coat the bees. Using a simple powder sugar shaker from the kitchen (thanks to my wife for letting me use hers) I filled it up and gave a light dusting to the bees.

Coating them in powder sugar causes the mites to loose their grip and fall down through the screen bottom board and out of the hive.

It also causes the bees to groom themselves and each other which helps knock additional mites off.



The picture below is one of my favorites. You can see the powder sugar raining down in the middle of the picture, and granules of sugar falling from the bottom of the frame, probably from the bees shaking it off of themselves.



In the picture below, the bees gathered together and festooned off the bottom corner of the frame once they were covered in sugar.



One of the things we hadn't anticipated, is that once the bees were covered with sugar, they took to the air. Thousands of bees took flight to clean their wings and get themselves re-orientated.

I mean, if someone took the roof off of your house, and dusted powder sugar on you, I'm sure you'd run outside to see what was going on too!

They weren't angry, none of them attacked us, they were just out and about cleaning themselves. It was really something neat to see.

Once we were done, we noticed quite a few bees gathered on the lower branches of nearby brush. They were cleaning themselves and each other just like we expected!



Within a few minutes, they were all back in their hives, and everyone was happy again.