"Can you tell us your
 mite sampling technique(s), thresholds, and treatment
 techniques?"

Both of us that treat use the alcohol wash method for counts.

I treated this year in the early spring without even sampling.  Last year I was late getting treatments on and did not treat until May and had a rather obvious disease issue as I was seeing a lot of crawlers, deformed wings and K wings.  I did not treat two years ago and paid a pretty big price in dead hives two winters ago for not treating and that experience gave me religion.  The other guy that treats tends to mainly treat starting in August.  I do not know what he uses as a threshold.  I treated last year late season if I saw three mites per 100 bees or more.

I have been using Apivar strips.  The other guy that treats uses MAQS.

A big advantage to treating early spring is one strip will treat the hive.  Hives typically have only two frames with a decent patch of brood on April 1 after the winters we have.  One strip is an under treatment by mid May as the brood nest will be past five frames by then.  It is an over treatment when put in on April 1.

Treatments are a timing problem.  With many products you are not supposed to treat during a honey flow you will harvest and we get a major golden rod and aster flow starting most years in late August to frost that limits fall treatments.  Our main flow starts mid to late May and ends mid to late July.  So, we do not have many good windows, other than early, for things like Apivar unless you are willing to not harvest part of the flow.  Timing makes MAQS attractive, particularly for late treatments.

Dick




" Any discovery made by the human mind can be explained in its essentials to the curious learner."  Professor Benjamin Schumacher talking about teaching quantum mechanics to non scientists.   "For every complex problem there is a solution which is simple, neat and wrong."  H. L. Mencken

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