My suggestion to the bee industry, since most of us replace queens at regular intervals, is to only replace queens with daughters of queens whose colonies "lived" (maintained low mite levels), as opposed to replacing them with daughters from queens whose colonies would have died (as evidenced by
high mite counts). The point is, that so long as we are ruthlessly
selective at the queen level, there is no need to ever allow the workers on a colony to die from mites.
But those colonies are workers and the drones which manage to be seemingly very successful before they die.
How do you account for that since many of our hives are superceded on a fairly regular basis??
Charles
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