> Do not fog the mineral oil, the method may work well but it could cost
> you your life.... Fogged/atomized mineral oil applied in a cylinder
> (hive box) will in the right mixture with air be explosive, combine this
> with the ever present ignition devise (smoker) and you have the
> ingredients for a disaster.
 
Hmmm.
 
I understand that formic acid is also explosive in the correct mixture and
so is cyanide (used for many years as a method of killing hives), yet I've
never heard of any explosions...
 
As a matter of interest, I recently received a note that the oil foggers
of which I had heard and enquired on this list may have been used to
vaporize Mavrik or some such chemical into hives, rather than mineral oil,
so it is interesting that someone is going to try using mineral oil. The
idea is intriguing, and I salute the person who has gotten a fogger and is
going to tinker a bit.
 
As I recall, that person  has a lot of bees.  One does not keep that many
hives for long without having a lot of smarts, so I imagine that there
will be careful experimenting with quantity of oil, concentration of fog,
and timing before very many hives get fogged.
 
Nonetheless, the warning about smokers may be a good one, since for the
oil fog to circulate through a hive, I should imagine that the bees would
ideally *not* be clustered much, and that they should be fanning.  Smoke
helps obtain these conditions.
 
I recall that -- when younger--  we used to fill 5 gallon cans with an
oxygen/acetylene mixture and apply a spark with a spark plug tester
transformer.  Parts of the cans would be found a long way off; the sides
usually separated at the seam and became more or less a flat piece and the
ends balloned, then attempted earth orbit.  So I can personally testify
that a small volume of the correct gases mixed just right can generate a
lot of bang.
 
It wouldn't be hard to do a test explosion of oil fog in free air or an
empty hive to evalute the hazard, but the best thing is obviously not to
smoke a hive after applying the fog.
 
Allen