Varroa mite in Australia in 2026: what every beekeeper needs to know

For most of 2023 the question every Australian beekeeper asked themselves on a Sunday morning was the same: do I still have time. The first detection of varroa at the Port of Newcastle in June 2022 set off the largest biosecurity response this industry has ever seen. Eradication zones, mandatory euthanasia, paid compensation, hive movement bans. By September 2023 the National Management Group had conceded the obvious: eradication of Varroa destructor from the Australian mainland was no longer technically feasible. The response shifted to transition to management. That was three years ago.

Today, in 2026, varroa is not a New South Wales problem any more. Confirmed detections have been recorded across Victoria, Queensland and South Australia. Western Australia and Tasmania remain officially varroa-free, but no serious beekeeper plans on that lasting forever. If you are reading this in Perth or Hobart, the right thing to do is to learn the testing routine now, while you still have the luxury of practice runs.

This piece is a status check and a plan. It is not a substitute for the official guidance from NSW DPI or AgVic, both of which update their varroa pages frequently. Read those too.

What changed in the response

The eradication phase relied on three things working perfectly: rapid detection, complete movement standstill in red zones, and euthanasia of every hive within a defined radius of an infested premises. Two of those held. The third did not. By mid-2023 surveillance was finding new infested premises faster than tracing could keep up, and the geographic spread had moved well outside the original Newcastle cluster.

The Transition to Management plan, agreed by the National Management Group in September 2023, formally ended eradication and started a four-phase pivot. The phases run roughly through 2027 and include education, surveillance redesign, treatment access, and industry-wide adoption of integrated pest management (IPM). For beekeepers this means three practical changes:

• You are now expected to monitor your own hives. Self-surveillance is the backbone of management.
• You are now expected to treat. APVMA has expanded the registration list for varroacides, including a path for emergency permits.
• Movement controls still exist around new detections, but the broad red and purple zones of 2022 to 2023 are gone in most of NSW.

The new baseline: monitor every hive, every quarter

If your existing inspection routine does not include a varroa count, it is out of date. The NSW DPI and AgVic guidance both now name a quarterly minimum, with monthly counts during the brood-rearing months from September through April.

There are three accepted methods. Pick one and stick with it.

• Sugar shake. A 300-bee sample dusted with icing sugar in a jar. The bees survive. Fast, kind, and good enough for a first signal.
• Alcohol wash. A 300-bee sample agitated in methylated spirits. The bees do not survive. More accurate than sugar shake. Used by every commercial operation that has been honest with itself.
• Sticky board with a screened bottom. Passive overnight count. Useful as a trend indicator but slow.

The threshold to act on, broadly, is 3 mites per 100 bees from a sugar shake or alcohol wash. Above that you are not deciding whether to treat. You are deciding which treatment.

What good record keeping looks like now

The compliance argument for digital varroa records used to be soft. It is not soft any more. When DPI inspectors ask for your last twelve months of mite counts, the answer "I have it in a notebook somewhere" is a slow path to losing your registration. A simple per-hive log with date, method, sample size and result is the minimum. A trend chart is better, because it lets you see the slope before you cross the threshold.

This is the part where, as the person who builds Bee Manager, I would normally pitch the app. I will skip it. The point is: have a record, in a format you can hand over, that proves you are doing what the response plan says you should be doing.

Treatment access in 2026

The APVMA-registered list has expanded considerably since 2023. As of early 2026, the practical options for Australian beekeepers are:

• Oxalic acid (vaporisation and dribble), useful in broodless periods.
• Formic acid (Formic Pro and similar), works through capped brood, temperature sensitive.
• Thymol-based products (Apiguard), reliable, slow, withdrawal applies.
• Synthetic pyrethroids (Bayvarol, Apistan strips), high efficacy when resistance has not built, withdrawal applies.

Registration changes. Always check the APVMA Public Chemical Registration Information System before you apply anything. And note that several of these have honey super withdrawal periods. If you treat with a super on, you are no longer in the "honey for sale" business until withdrawal expires. Log the treatment date and the withdrawal end date, every time.

What every Australian beekeeper should do this month

If you take one thing from this article:

• Do a sugar shake on your three strongest hives this week. Get used to the technique while the result is probably zero.
• Buy or build the kit now: a wide-mouth jar, an 8-mesh screen lid, a bag of pure icing sugar, a measuring cup that holds about 300 bees (around half a cup of bees by volume).
• Decide what your treatment plan looks like and read the label before the day you need it. The label is a long document. The day you find a 6 mite count is not the day to read it for the first time.
• Update your records. If you cannot answer the question "what was my mite load on this hive 90 days ago", fix that this weekend.

The eradication window closed three years ago. The hives that come through the next decade are going to be the hives whose owners treated varroa monitoring as a normal part of an inspection, the same way they check brood pattern and stores. There is nothing exotic about it. It is just one more thing on the list. Add it to the list.