Backyard beekeepers on varroa: 6 Australian hobbyists share what they learned

Six Australian backyard beekeepers, from Melbourne to the NSW Far North Coast, share the reality of managing varroa in a hobby apiary.

Last updated: July 2026

As of July 2026, varroa has been detected in every mainland state on Australia's east coast and is continuing to spread inland and west. The way it hits a backyard beekeeper with two or three hives is nothing like the way it hits a commercial operation. To find out what's actually happening in Australian back yards, we asked six hobby beekeepers to share their story: when they first saw a mite, what treatments they tried, what they lost, and what they wish they had known earlier. Their answers are honest, sometimes hard, and full of practical advice you will not find in a manufacturer's leaflet.

Who is in this article?

These six beekeepers replied to our callout in June 2026. Between them they run around twenty hives across two Australian states. Three have lost most of their bees. Two are still in their first year of managing varroa. One has decided to stop until the mite pressure eases in his valley.

Their full stories are below. If you have just found your first mite and want practical help, skip to the five things every one of them said at the end.

Yvonne, Eungella, NSW: "Do what has to be done to save the bees, the honey can wait"

Yvonne is on the NSW Far North Coast, up on the Tweed. She started beekeeping in January 2024 with two nucs from a helpful local breeder and built up to five hives. She has run a mix of Langstroth boxes and Flow gear, on a rural property surrounded by treed hills. She knew varroa was coming. She had, in her words, been "fairly disgusted that Australia was free of it and we were not able to maintain that."

She detected mites in September 2025 with an alcohol wash. She had heard varroa was within a half hour drive but did not test straight away. When she did, she ordered treatment immediately and put strips into the three hives she was running by that point. Then she powered through the season. The bees kept bringing in honey. The hives were brimming.

Then April came, the weather cooled, and she tested again.

"Detected ridiculous levels of mites as the cool weather was coming. So that was the end of the season, even if they were still bringing in the goods. Ordered more treatments. We were too late. Lost two hives to slime out and one seems to have lost their queen."

The numbers behind that phrase are worth pausing on. One of Yvonne's washes returned 166 mites in a sample of 300 bees, a load of roughly 55 mites per 100. Another hive came back at 191. Most Australian guidance suggests acting somewhere around 2 to 3 mites per 100 bees, so those colonies were carrying something in the order of twenty times the level at which a beekeeper would normally step in. She treated every hive in the apiary. For some it was too late.

Of the five hives she had by then, two were destroyed by small hive beetle slime-out, the by-product of a colony too weakened by varroa to defend itself. A third lost its queen and simply dwindled away. Two came through. Her advice to anyone about to find their first mite is short and practical: read the Australian Honey Bee Council's Chemical Treatment Table, keep extra treatment on hand, talk to a beekeeping supplier with hands-on experience, and understand that beetle larvae survive after days under water. She has learned that lesson the hard way.

The two survivors are the more encouraging half of the story. The hive that returned 166 mites is still a strong two-box colony, and when Yvonne tested it again on 22 July 2026 the wash came back clean. By every reasonable expectation it should not still be there. She calls it the miracle hive. The hive that returned 191 was caught later, with beetle grubs already beginning. They cleared out as many as they could and treated it in time to stop the slime taking hold. It is down to around six frames now, but it still has its queen and Yvonne is feeding it honey through the winter.

Her closing note is the one that stayed with us:

"It is not always possible to remain fully organic. Slime out is quick if your bees don't have the power to prevent it. Do what has to be done to save the bees, the honey can wait."

Peter, Bellingen, NSW: the beekeeper who stopped

Peter working his single hive in Bellingen before varroa reached the Bellinger Valley. Photos: Peter, Bellingen, NSW.

Peter has been beekeeping four years, most recently running a single hive in his back yard in Bellingen on the NSW Mid-North Coast. He heard varroa was near in late 2024. His local beekeeping supplier at Woolgoolga told him it was a matter of time before the mite reached the Bellinger Valley. He was right. In May 2025, after a long wet spell, Peter checked his hive and found the colony was already collapsing.

"I discovered the hive was weakened by varroa and the small hive beetle invaded and destroyed the hive. My bees abandoned. I decided to remove all frames from the brood and honey boxes and clean out all the dead bees and slimed frames. I then decided not to repopulate the hive."

Peter has been advised to wait until 2027 before starting again. The feral honeybee population in the Bellinger Valley is still spreading mites at a rate that would make a new hive extremely difficult to defend. His warning to others is calm and practical:

"Contact your local beekeeping supplier and check what miticides are recommended for the area. Keep checking for small hive beetle and work on keeping the hive dry."

Prue, Batemans Bay area, NSW: adaptation, not defeat

Prue started beekeeping during COVID, learning from her great-uncle who had kept bees for sixty years. She lives on rural land outside Batemans Bay, surrounded by state and national forest. She currently has four active hives, three new boxes she is building for swarms she caught this summer, and one nucleus she is nursing through winter. She detected varroa two summers ago and is entering her third season with it.

Her monitoring routine has changed twice already. She tried the sugar shake first, then methylated spirits, then landed on the humble dish liquid wash. She still checks every month, except through winter, and prefers a low-suds dish soap because the mites float where you can count them. She also has a piece of practical advice for anyone whose eyes are not what they used to be:

"If you use reading glasses just use your phone to take an image of the shaker or washer from underneath and count later."

Prue has accepted, in her words, that her boxes will not be mite free. She has stopped hunting for queens to mark them and now simply makes sure the queen is not on the frame she plans to shake. She has switched exclusively to 8-frame hives so she can still lift them by herself. Her closing thought is a reminder that beekeeping is a community activity:

"Learn and share with your clubs. Don't think you don't have to manage varroa. The other person may lose your hives in learning how to work with varroa, but at least they will be given a chance."

Muhammed, Liverpool, NSW: one year in, five hives, and swarm-catcher for the neighbourhood

Muhammed started beekeeping about a year ago. He is based in Prestons, in Sydney's south-west, and joined the Macarthur Beekeeping Association to build his knowledge from the ground up. He keeps one hive at home and four more on his friend Xavier's farm, all from swarms he learned to catch. He detected varroa in all five hives late in his first summer through a sugar shake test.

"When I saw the mite counts, I was deeply worried. Recognising the urgency, I started targeted treatments immediately."

He applied Bayvarol strips to all five hives in May 2026. When he checked again at the end of July, the mite population was almost entirely eradicated across the whole apiary. Muhammed is now one of the more useful voices in this article for anyone still weighing up whether varroa is really their problem yet.

"Varroa doesn't care how many years of experience you have. Complacency is the biggest mistake you can make. If you keep bees, monitoring is not optional. If you don't actively check, your colonies will simply die."

Anonymous beekeeper, North Melbourne, VIC: the single-mite story

Left: this beekeeper's two hives at his small urban farm in inner-northern Melbourne. Right: the single varroa mite he photographed for identification, one of the first confirmed cases in his area. Photos: Anonymous, North Melbourne, VIC.

This beekeeper (who prefers to stay anonymous) has been keeping bees for his first year, running two hives at a small urban farm in the inner northern suburbs of Melbourne. He first heard about varroa when it arrived in Australia a few years ago, while he was completing a short course in beekeeping. He detected a single mite in January 2026 through a routine alcohol wash. It was, at the time, one of the first confirmed varroa cases in his area.

"It hadn't actually been identified in my area yet, so it was super unexpected."

He treated with Formic Pro in the autumn with success. He tried a queen cage and a drone-cell frame method (both unsuccessful). One of his hives became noticeably more aggressive as the mite count rose. His single biggest lesson, from his first year of coexisting with varroa, is this:

"I thought I would have to treat immediately to eradicate it. I didn't realise the population could reach a certain threshold before treating for it. Take time to understand the mite and its life cycle. It will help you understand your treatment options and make the best choices."

Geoff, Lake Macquarie, NSW: the beekeeper who came back after varroa

Geoff started beekeeping in the late 1970s at high school, then dipped in and out over the decades. He restarted for good in 2024, two years after varroa reached Australia via the Port of Newcastle in June 2022. His neighbour's hives were part of the eradication phase and the following year Geoff noticed there was not a single bee in his garden. It was the direct reason he took it up again, initially to restore pollination in his permaculture food forest.

He is honest about his first year back:

"I did not monitor the problem well. I seriously underestimated how difficult it would be to manage varroa. As a result, my hive absconded in late May 2025 before I was able to harvest my first crop of honey."

He rebuilt with three swarms he caught the next season in his daughter's yard. This time he got the monitoring rhythm right. He now runs three Flow Hives and does a monthly alcohol wash, plotting his numbers in an app. He credits the American beekeeping educator Randy Oliver at Scientific Beekeeping as his go-to reference. His observation about timing is worth reading twice:

"I believe I had an advantage getting into beekeeping after the initial wave of varroa had passed. By this stage all the wild colonies in the bush had been wiped out, reducing the 'varroa bomb effect' where hives rob dead wild hives and get heavily re-infested. This 'bomb effect' appears to be what the Queensland beekeepers are experiencing at the moment."

He has a specific number that gives new beekeepers hope. One of his hives hit a mite count of 54. He brought it down to 12 in one month, and to 4 the month after, using oxalic acid strips alone.

What every one of them said

Read carefully and you find five pieces of advice that come out of nearly every response, across six beekeepers in two states with completely different setups:

1. Monitor before you think you need to. Yvonne, Muhammed, Peter and Geoff all named this as the single lesson they most wish they had learned earlier. Alcohol wash is the standard method in the group.
2. Treat early. Waiting until a threshold gets exceeded, or waiting for confirmation of nearby detections, is the mistake that lost hives in two of these stories.
3. Rotate treatments. The organic options (oxalic acid strips, oxalic acid vapour, formic acid) and the synthetics (Bayvarol, Apivar) each have advantages and limitations. The beekeepers with the best outcomes are cycling between them.
4. Small hive beetle finds a weakened hive fast. Two of the losses in this article were slime-outs, not direct varroa death. Once a colony's numbers drop enough that they cannot defend the hive, SHB moves in within days.
5. Talk to your local beekeepers. Every single respondent named a supplier, a club or a mentor as the source of the advice that made the biggest difference to their outcomes.

What treatments did they use, and did any work?

For a full list of treatment options approved in Australia (and the pros, cons and withholding periods for each), Yvonne points beekeepers to the BeeAware chemical treatment guidance. It is the reference our respondents keep next to their hive tool.

Ready to test your own hives?

If you have not tested your hives yet, the single most useful thing you can do this week is one alcohol wash on your strongest colony. It takes 15 minutes and it is the same method every beekeeper in this article uses.

Frequently asked questions

Q: How often should a backyard beekeeper check for varroa? A: The beekeepers in this article check anywhere from every four weeks (Muhammed, Geoff, Prue) to fortnightly (Prue when she suspects an issue). Weekly sticky-mat checks are also common. Winter is the exception. Most step back to monthly or hold off in cold weather.

Q: What happens if I don't treat my hive for varroa? A: Based on the stories in this article, the colony collapses within one season. In two of the losses here, the varroa did not directly kill the colony. It weakened the hive enough that small hive beetle moved in and finished the job, in a matter of days once the tipping point was reached.

Q: Do I have to use chemical treatments? A: Not necessarily, but you do need something. Every respondent used at least one registered treatment. Even the beekeepers with the strongest organic preference (Yvonne, Geoff, the anonymous Melbourne beekeeper) rotated in synthetic strips when counts rose. As Yvonne put it: it is not always possible to remain fully organic.

Q: How long can I keep bees before I have to worry about varroa? A: Not long. Muhammed detected varroa in all five of his hives inside his first year. The Melbourne beekeeper detected a single mite in his first year. If varroa has reached your region, the safe assumption is that your bees have it too.

Q: Where can I find help if I have just found my first mite? A: Your local supplier and your local beekeeping club are the two most valuable calls you can make. Peter specifically called out the supplier at Woolgoolga as his key resource. Every state has a beekeeping association and most have volunteer biosecurity officers who will walk you through it.

This is part 2 of the Varroa Stories series

Read the full series:

• Part 1: Varroa in Australia, what 14 beekeepers have learned
• Part 2: This article
• Part 3: Small-business and community beekeepers, 6 Australian operators share what they learned
• Part 4: Preparing for the front line, a Central QLD outback beekeeper and an SA first-detector

Thanks to Yvonne, Peter, Prue, Muhammed, our anonymous Melbourne friend, and Geoff for sharing their stories.

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