> Old, but by no means irrelevant ... Interesting that drone excluders didn't reduce this. 

That's what I thought. Ongoing discussion, important observations re: drones. Also, they put the blame on ferals, whereas we now believe isolated ferals to be fairly mite free whereas the real culprit appears to be neglected hives. 

This may mean treatment free hobbyists, or large scale producers who aren't tightly managing their bees. In a typical large scale operation there may be 50-100 hives jammed together in each bee yard. 

A lot of them aren't being closely watched, especially if the operators are running several thousand hives in multiple states. As a bee inspector, I saw large apiaries with all the hives crashing, overrun by mites.

PLB

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