Wow, Kristina, that *does* sound tricky the way you describe it!

I guess I have it easy: I use an Apinovar bottom board, so the
sliding drawer is corruplast (doesn't warp) with a wooden frame,
and I have access from either side, so I don't have to grab and pull;
I can push it out.  I use commercial sticky boards; a bit expensive,
but no muss no fuss, reliably sticky, and with only one or two hives,
I can afford to use them.  I write the date and time of insertion
on the cardboard, and make a note in my agenda to pull them out
three days later.  I've had no problems with bees propolizing the screen.

My eyesight isn't the best, so I wear an Optivisor magnifier to read
the results; I circle each "for sure a mite" with a Sharpie, and put
parentheses around each "maybe a mite"; I check the maybes with a
microscope.  Since my hives are six feet from my back door, I don't
have to worry about carrying the sticky boards very far.

The only problem I've found with the Apinovar bottom board is that
there's a lip on the front that prevents me from inserting an OA
vaporizer; it will be interesting to see if the company modifies the
design as OAV becomes more widely used.  In the meantime, I designed
a "replacement drawer" I can insert, that accommodates the vaporizer
from the side; my companion and I are quite DIY, so that was fun.

People who have several hives close to each other side by side
obviously would not be able to use this style of bottom board, and
people with lots of hives would find it too expensive to buy the
commercial sticky boards, I suspect.

Your point that one should expect different counts from different
population sizes is a good one.  I'm not going to pretend I really
have the hang of that yet; I just use our provincial guidelines
for treatment thresholds at various times of year.

> So, this is beginners, not experienced beekeepers.  I think they choose
> this method because they saw it on youtube, it doesn't kill bees, and they
> don't have to open the hive.

I sympathize with that; this summer was my sixth season of beekeeping,
and although I'm fine with opening the hive and examining the frames,
I haven't yet found the courage to scoop bees for a sugar or alcohol
shake mite count.  I'll get there.  Meanwhile I find the sticky
board easy, and I don't think it has let me down yet in terms of
mite counts.  I did lose my colony last winter, for the first time,
but as part of the post-mortem I did an alcohol wash on a sample of
the pile of dead bees (very healthy-looking aside from being dead!),
and found no mites.  (We probably screwed up the timing on a queen
replacement the previous summer.)

> Beginners need to be assured that you can't
> learn to keep bees on youtube, you have to get into your hive - it's the
> fun part!, and a poor count is gonna kill a lot (50,000) of bees, some of
> them mine.

Yes, yes, and yes, but I think that under the right circumstances,
a sticky board count can be much less intimidating, handy to see
treatment effectiveness, and sufficiently reliable to decide whether
to treat or not to treat at any given time.  Not that my inexperienced
opinion is worth that much in this august forum, but the sticky board
count *is* recommended by my provincial ministry of agriculture, so it
can't be all bad.  ;-)

> That was supposed to be simple. Sorry.

Actually, it was interesting.  Thanks.

Anne, backyard beekeeper, Montreal.

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