Let me continue with this thread, as it seems to have devolved from whether
it can be cost effective to sample every hive, to excuses why commercial
guys haven't made the effort to learn how to sample quickly, or
rationalizations that that it's quicker to simply treat everything.

In the bigger picture, such beekeepers are simply prolonging the misery of
the need to treat for varroa.  If instead, all beekeepers were to get
serious about selecting and breeding for varroa resistant bees, we might
actually start making serious progress.  But as I've found out, it will
take doing thousands of mite washes.

Granted, if a beekeeper runs standard commercial inbred stock he's unlikely
to find many hives in which mites don't build up over the course of the
season.

But if his stock is more genetically diverse, founded from queen lines
selected for mite resistance,and has a number of years of history of
selecting hives with the lowest rate of buildup, he will find  that there
are some colonies that manage on their own to keep varroa at bay.  Those
colonies should be worth their weight in gold.

But unless one is sampling the entire operation, those gems will be lost
with next season's requeening.  Without sampling, who knows how many queens
carrying genes for mite resistance we unknowingly lose each year?

Most beekeepers simply keep complaining while they wait for someone else to
solve the varroa problem.  We can keep throwing band aids at it (mite
treatments) or we can each personally contribute to the long-term solution
to the problem.

Any single large commercial beekeeper has more colonies to select from than
do all the varroa resistance breeding programs combined.  Based upon what
the researchers at Baton Rouge learned from their selection programs, the
main thing slowing progress on coming up with mite resistant bees is lack
of colonies monitored for rate of mite buildup.

I make no claim for having great stock, but we've sampled several hundred
hives this month, all started from nucs this spring (with an oxalic
treatment).  All also got either a single MAQS or a couple of OA dribbles
(the late nucs) in June.  This week we've found a few dozen with mite
counts of zero, compared to averages around 5, and a percentage in the 20
range.  We've withheld treatment from the zero and 1 hives to see whether
they can maintain those low numbers.  And from those that do, we'll breed
daughters to requeen our operation next spring.  I suspect that if all
beekeepers did this, that varroa would become less of a problem each year.

-- 
Randy Oliver
Grass Valley, CA
www.ScientificBeekeeping.com

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