Hi Dick
"Has anyone generated data where they simply did a mite count "
Here is a table of the monitoring of one colony to follow varroa, nosema and bee immunity in our lab. The data give you a partial answer to your question. I take the emerging brood and see each individual cell under binocular, counting total varroa (only females) in the cell. For the bees, I shake a central frame in a returned roof and take a sample of the bees in a jar, I put the bees in alcool and see individually the bees under binocular, as I noticed that I could miss some varroa just shaking the bees in alcool.
The colony was treated by APIVAR the 7 of august, just after taking the sample : after 15 days, i do not find any varroa in the bees, but the level of varroa increased dramatically in the brood, supposed to be the consequence of the reduction of the brood surface. I counted only alive varroa (I had some dead varroa in the brood, for the first time, in last observation, as an effect of the treatment).
I calculated for you the % of the varroa seen inside the brood, it varies from 45 to 100% with a mean of 82% in this case, this experiment will be followed during a complete year.
Hope it could help
brood bees
date observed
nymphs Nb of
varroa % observed bees
Nb of varrroa % % varroa in brood
11/07/2018 205 8 3,90 289 0 0,00 100,0
18/07/2018 173 5 2,89 312 0 0,00 100,0
24/07/2018 450 5 1,11 330 6 1,82 45,5
07/08/2018 307 34 11,07 450 6 1,33 85,0
22/08/2018 237 14 5,91 429 8 1,86 63,6
11/09/2018 465 75 16,13 459 0 0,00 100,0
Thanks for the quality of this list
Michel BOCQUET
Beekeeping consulting +R&D
(France)
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