On Thu, 31 Aug 2006 12:49:26 GMT, [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]> 
wrote:

>I collected one colony from a house a while ago that had loads of
>varroa.  (The first varroa infested feral colony for me ever.)  I
>gave them a virgin queen from my 'preferred stock.'  At this point
>the colony's brood has emerged and the new queen started laying
>several days ago.

Hi,
I thought I'd share some thoughts regarding Waldemar's situation.  If 
you're at a stage completely free of any capped brood, it seems like you 
have a lot of options (oxalic acid probably being one, but something I 
don't really know much about).  One option I was wondering about was if you 
just sacrificed the first couple frames of brood to get capped, maybe froze 
them and returned them.  Wouldn't almost all the remaining varroa mites be 
pretty eager to reproduce by now and so invade the first available brood to 
start getting capped?  I'm not necessarily recommending this, but thinking 
it might be a straightforward possibility.  Another related question is if 
you took a natural mite drop on this colony about a week after such a 
colony started capping brood (before any of it started to hatch), would you 
get a really falsely) low count?  It seems such a dynamic could really skew 
the accuracy of some mite drop tests.
Eric

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