> In the early 1990s we were shown by Government
> inspectors how to use tobacco smoke to cause a
> mite drop but it seems to have gone out of fashion.
Well, you can also get a very respectable mite drop (over and above the
ambient drop rate) by spraying water onto the top bars of a hive.
Adding something to the smoker seemed a harmless enough suggestion at the
time, as getting mites off the bees certainly seemed a step in the right
direction, and it was nowhere near as silly as things like the hive with the
circular rotating combs.
https://www.apiservices.biz/en/articles/sort-by-popularity/826-konya-beehive
-rotating-broodnest
https://tinyurl.com/ycelxr6d
Varroa brought out the unintentional charlatan in beekeepers. Everyone who
had any survival or even good mite drop rates was elated, and wanted to help
others (or profit, or self-aggrandize) by insisting that he had found "the
answer".
Prior to the spread of varroa, the main problem was controlling swarming, as
the bees were far more prolific, and thus the beekeeper's goal was to keep
them out of the trees, as they would not make honey for the beekeeper in a
tree.
Since then, despite much pontification and endless impotent half-solutions,
we still do not have any repeatable, consistently viable control for varroa
that can assure any one hive's survival. What we do have is a lot of
self-promotion around approaches that show only marginal incremental
improvements over partial solutions. We also have a lot of tap-dancing
around "management", which mostly entails accepting a significant percentage
of colony losses, or papering over them with constant splits, and other
mechanisms to "stay ahead of" the losses.
We humans are temporarily in the same boat in regard to Covod-19 - we lack
good detection, we have no known way to unconditionally cure infections, and
the impact is widespread enough to impact all of us.
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