ProDFM 10kg

01 · WHAT IT IS AND HOW TO APPLY IT

Ten grams a hive, over the top bars

You dust 10 grams — a tablespoon — over the top of the brood chamber frames, straight onto the top bars. To spread it better, mix those 10 g with about 30 g of icing sugar and dust the mixture.

The 10 kg tub gives 1,000 applications, so the cost per hive per time is in cents. It is a commercial format, not a hobby one: at three or four applications a year it covers a couple of hundred hives.

02 · TWO WEEKS AFTER ANY TREATMENT

The rule that decides whether it does anything at all

The health treatments applied in a hive, varroa control among them, do not discriminate: they wipe out what has just been added as well. So at least two weeks have to pass after any treatment before applying it.

Applying it the same day a treatment comes off is throwing the product away. That calendar detail matters more than the dose.

03 · WHEN, ACROSS THE YEAR

Spring, autumn and the moves

The usual windows are spring, before the flow, and autumn, preparing for wintering, which is when the colony changes gear. In migratory operations it tends to be repeated every four months, along with the moves.

Altogether that is three to six applications a year depending on management. It is not an emergency product: it makes sense inside a calendar, not as a reaction.

04 · THEY ARE LIVING ORGANISMS

And that governs how it is stored

A microbial supply is only worth anything if it reaches the hive alive. Heat, direct light and damp are its enemies, so the container is kept closed, cool and in the dark, and not left in the van in the sun between apiaries.

For the same reason it is not dissolved in warm syrup or mixed with anything that comes lukewarm. It goes on dry or with icing sugar, which is how it is meant to be used.

05 · BEFORE YOU BUY

A commercial format with one calendar rule.