My experience with MAQS has been less than stellar.

As Randy pointed out, it's tough getting the right dosage to have an
effective mite kill, but not impact the bees too much. With the top flash,
the beekeeper has the ability of using 50%, 65%, 80% or even 90% FA, as
well as using between 80 and 120 ml of FA for each treatment. Two large
factors that can have great impacts.

Beyond the two basic factors, you also have to be conscious of the size of
the opening of the colony, volume of the colony, temperature, and humidity.
That's also not considering the application method, meaning how quickly the
FA will disburse. And I've also heard the age of the comb (and ability for
FA to penetrate the cappings) can impact it's efficacy rate. Some of these
factors may come into play lesser than others, granted, but it's still an
additional 6 factors that need to be considered. Too much FA, and you have
massive brood kill (possibly a dead queen), or worse a colony that
absconds. Too little and you wasted the time and money treating.

MAQS appears to narrow the factors considerably, meaning they have already
determined the FA strength (actually, it isn't the same FA in the top
flash, but still) and volume of the treatment. Which means that it's
already set for a very narrow window of entrance size, volume, temp and
humidity. While you can cut the treatment in half, in essence you are
changing the volume of treatment, which would only set it for another
narrow window. Unfortunately, I haven't had the desire (or the cash) to use
MAQS enough to know exactly what that narrow window is set to. And I'm not
interested in figuring out how many half, quarter, or eights of pads I need
to provide for a specific colony.

But getting back to our eight main factors, I feel FA has fantastic
potential, if only we could figure out the formula for treatments. Figuring
out the formula shouldn't be *too *insane. As long as you keep seven of the
factors the same and only test for one (for example, FA volume). Once
you've dialed that one factor into a 99% kill rate, with minimal bee
losses, make that FA volume constant, and change another variable
(temperture, or humidity, for example). Graphing the results from the two
trials would give you a correlation, and then you just repeat. You would
need a few hundred colonies (which I don't have), and plenty of mites to
kill, and a fairly consistent environment (wild swings in temps or humidity
would make things extremely difficult). But it's possible.

Anyone up for the task?

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