In reply to Andrew...there is one point that did not come out in Rusty's article: in very bee-dense areas, where there are many colonies sharing a flight range, and pollination bees visiting local fields, all drifting freely between colonies, the area mite loads are sufficiently high and sufficiently replenished, that it becomes not so much a question of treating by the calendar as "treating as often as the bee year permits".

In my small area we host many urban backyard beekeepers, two or three larger sideliners and an annual load of pollination bees to serve the very nearby blueberry fields.  With one major honey flow, there are only so many windows for treatment. Locally, they break down into "midwinter, early spring, after the honey harvest (early July), late summer, just before winter wrap-up (late October)". 

Using every available window seems to be necessary for us, given our high local mite densities. So testing is not useful so much in triggering the act of treatment, but in evaluating if the treatment just given was efficacious, timely, and sufficient.

Testing post treatment in some of our club members' hives this September revealed that mite loads were catastrophic, even after a late August treatment. Turns out some nearby apiaries were collapsing under mite pressure, presumably acting both as mite bombs and robbing targets. This points up the importance of area-wide efforts to suppress mite populations and to prevent swarms in spring.

Mercifully, most of us are not in such bee-dense areas, and so can aspire to longer intervals between treatments...as long an interval as can be justified by accurate mite counts. 

             ***********************************************
The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software.  For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html