Dick, I'm glad to see that you also noticed something that is counter
intuitive about population buildup.
All one need do is to go to my model, to the "Necessary Mite Reduction"
tab, and play with the spacing of treatments.  You'll quickly see that at a
constant rate of exponential growth, the spacing doesn't make a bit of
difference.

That said, with varroa buildup in real life, there is some difference,
because the daily r value changes over the course of the season, due to the
amount of brood, mite immigration, and other factors.  Of course I'm not
talking about the difference between treating when broodless compared to
when there's brood.

If you want to have some fun Dick, I created a model that calculates mite
emergence and invasion of cells on a daily basis--that's what I used to
calculate the expected results of oxalic vaporizations at different time
intervals in my article Modeling the Effects of Mite Treatments
<http://scientificbeekeeping.com/the-varroa-problem-part-15/>.

-- 
Randy Oliver
Grass Valley, CA
www.ScientificBeekeeping.com

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