Christina: Personally I doubt that they had a wide range of mite loads when the experiment was set up.
That's a sweeping assumption. If they started from packages, maybe. If not, I've seldom seen hives that didn't have a few outliers. Our own 53 from this summer, mostly started from packages and varroa free, still had a couple of outliers with mites. So we treated everything before the trial and at end of summer, when again we found a few showing evidence of mites. If we hadn't, any bets would be off in terms of reliable data concerning over-wintering survival.
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