> I believe you suggested that I could

> not prove I killed them and they the mites I thought I killed might have
> died anyhow.


My point is that I feel that it is shortsighted to focus upon how many
mites were killed.  If a treatment simply kept them from successfully
reproducing, it wouldn't need to kill a single mite in order to completely
control mite populations!

To my way of thinking, the only meaningful way to test the efficacy of any
treatment would be to compare the normalized trends of mite infestation
rate (not total mite numbers, which are relative to colony size) over time
comparing a number of control colonies to an equal number of treated
colonies.

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

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