>
> 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.  ;-)
>

I'm not sure how reliable it is in determining treatment effectiveness. If
you keep the sticky board in place while treating, and you come back to a
board covered in varroa, you can't tell how effective the treatment is. Was
it a 70% kill or a 98% kill? No way to tell. If you do a pre-treatment
sticky board, followed by a post-treatment sticky board, you'll have the
ability to compare the two, which will give you an *indication* of mite
counts, sure. But the results are misleading. If I get 25 mites on a sticky
board in September, do an Apivar treatment for 42 days, then come back in
mid-November to do a follow up sticky board test and find 5 mites, the
numbers aren't comparable. The population pre-treatment was larger, so
should have had more mites. But its difficult to tell what the population
change was. If pre-treatment you had 20,000 bees and post treatment you had
15,000 bees, the results are different than if pre-treatment you had 25,000
bees and post treatment you had 15,000 bees. It seems insignificant, but
keep in mind that for alcohol washes most advocate a treatment threshold of
a 2% infestation rate. 3% is considered dangerous, and 4% can spell death
during certain times of year. That's a very narrow window for infestation
rates.

Sticky boards also have the potential to select *against* some of the
traits you should be looking for in bees, namely grooming behavior. Lets
say you have 2 hives. Both have 30,000 bees and 600 mites in them (2%
infestation rate). One hive has a population that aggressively grooms
mites. Another hive has a population that doesn't. You put sticky boards in
both hives for 72 hours. You pull one out and count 100 mites. You pull
another one out and count 10 mites. Your first reaction is that the 100
mite board is infested with mites and needs a treatment immediately, while
the 10 mite board is probably doing fine. Except its the exact opposite.
The 100 mite board colony is dealing with their mite levels (and just
brought it below treatment threshold), and the 10 mite board isn't and will
likely be dead if you don't intervene.

Sticky boards are better than doing nothing, which is why your provincial
ministry of agriculture recommends it. If they only recommended alcohol or
sugar shakes, no beginner beekeeper would do it (you're six years in and
can't build up the nerve to do it). But interpreting sticky board data into
an actual usable number is very difficult.

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