07/07/2026
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1CxBS3m2Cp/
How to use the Stinging Nettle smoke to treat your hives against Varroa.
Considering the success and interest that you took from my post from yesterday, where I discussed the recent findings about how Stinging Nettle can help us in the fight against Varroa, I'll make this second treatment post.
This is how I would do and use the smoke treatment, and this is my interpretation of the methods that researchers used in that study.
I strongly encourage you to read it too.
With that being said, let's start 🤓
The process requires you to use thoroughly dried and homogenized stinging nettle plant material that has been prepared for clean combustion.
Let it dry at room temperature (25C) first.
You should weigh out exactly 10-12 grams of this dried nettle material for each individual hive treatment and you'll have to take into consideration the volume of your box.
This 10gram weight is for a box that has 7 frames, from what I understood.
I strongly advise you to test the dossage with slight variants of 10, 11, 12, 13 and maybe 15 grams depending on the volume of your box (if you have supers on for example).
Considering the plant's volume, I believe the correct play is to load this 10 gram payload directly into a standard bee smoker and pump the dense aerosols straight into the target colony.
You must immediately cover and seal the hive completely to trap the heavy smoke within the box (you should already know that, but I wanted to say it again).
According to this study, you must repeat this application at a strict 3 day interval.
I strongly think you need to know that this tight 3 day window is biologically mandatory because botanical smoke acts rapidly but has a highly short lived effect.
You should maintain this continuous management cycle across a timeline of 3 weeks to match the reproductive windows of the parasite.
Let us look at the chemical why behind this application method.
The intense heat of plant combustion releases vital acaricidal compounds such as catechol derivatives, 2 hexadecanol, and cis 9 12 octadecadienoic acid directly into the hive atmosphere (boring, I know :) ).
The hard math in the study proves that this exact smoke delivery method knocks out an incredible 94.82 percent of the mites reproducing safely inside your sealed worker brood cells (not so boring, isn't it?).
If you choose to TEST this method, make sure to test it on a small sample of no more than 10% of your total apiary count.
Act like a scientist and try to measure its effects, and after you've concluded a full set of treatments, do it all over again to second test your results.
Please let me know how it went 🙏
If you enjoyed this article, I invite you to read the first chapter of my book.
You can find it in my bio 🙏
Thank you for reading 📖
I'd love to hear your thoughts on this topic 🧡
Please leave a like if you've found this interesting 🐝
Happy beekeeping and full barrels 🐝🍯
