>
> > The Tibor Szabo references are presumably relevant to Varroa
> transmission only if the phoretic mite moved from a drone to a queen in
> flight.


I apparently wasn't clear on what you were asking for for your modeling.
It seemed to me that you were asking for the theoretical distance for
isolation, which would make sense, since it takes only a single mite
transfer to establish a population of varroa.

Deeper in the paper you will find his analysis of how far his calculations
of drone flight were.  Since drones readily drift from hive to hive, that
would be a more reasonable distance to expect varroa to drift in any
numbers.

 However, since any mite that remains on a drone during the act of mating
is doomed to die, I'm not clear as to whether natural selection has
conferred upon the mite to climb from a drone in the act of mating to the
lucky queen.


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

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