Bill Marong's question of the effectiveness of formic when used with an
open bottom board is a good one. When they developed the directions for
the gel pack in Beltsville, they wrote that it should be used with an
open entrance.  I assume they meant a regular 3/4" entrance without an
entrance reducer in it or a 3/8" entrance on a pallet.This is to keep
the fumes from building up in the hive and killing queens or bees.   If
you used the screen on a bottom board, you would have the same size
entrance.  A screen without the bottom board would seemingly allow the
fumes out even faster. However, the polyurethane hives that the
Scandinavians are using all come with a  screen built into the bottom
board, and they have been using nothing but formic, lactic and oxalic
acid for mite control so it must not cause a problem.  I will pass it by
Dr. Jeff Pettis at the Beltsville lab, and since he developed both the
gel and the screened board, he can probably give us a better
explanation.
    2 The question of anesthetizing the bees - the Russians used some
kind of heat treatment but anything like that would be vary labor
intensive - if we were getting what they are getting (relative to their
standard of living - $50 lb.for honey), we could pick the damn things
off one at a time. The only Russian I met at Apimondia showed me a
picture of his car and his beehives - the car was a Mercedes 450.
      The research that was done on smoker additives to knock the mites
down - was it brought to fruition? Grape fruit leaves and neem  were
supposed to be ideal. Is anybody using it or were their some negative
consequences to its use such as honey contamination?
        Two years ago at the ABF at a small workshop attended by Dr.
Shimanuki and four or five others, I heard someone from the midwest
report on his success knocking the mites off by making them go through a
pollen trap. If you can knock pollen out of sack, why couldn't you
scrape mites off the bees by forcing them through a specially designed
entrance - maybe with some neem impregnated bristles - a kind of
automatic car wash for bees. Come out in the morning open up a back
entrance, let the field force out and make them come back in the front
where you have your car wash entrance. You can see that the pressure of
getting the gel on the market has gone to my head - I lay awake at night
killing varroa rather than counting sheep.
    3) There seems to be an unwillingness on the part of some writers to
accept the idea that live mites that fall through the screens  just sit
on the bottom board waiting for a ride until they die. Maybe the light
stuns them. We have all seem them move and know they are capable of
crawling back up, but they don't.  They just sit there
waiting for a warm body to jump on - like muggers in Central Park. We
can advance any number of explanations for this behavior, but I'm not
sure it is worth research dollars to discover the correct explanation.
      Two weeks ago today, I was down speaking at the beekeepers'
meeting in Florida and Kim Flottum indicated that there were rumors
about the the honey price was going to jump because of drought
conditions in Brazil and Argentina?  He implied that he would know
about it in a day or two.  Has anyone heard anything?
I don't wish a drought on anyone but I sure would like to sell last
year's honey for what it cost me to  make it.  Bob Stevens \
\  Incidentally, the address that comes though on my posts
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does not work for anyone trying to contact me directly. The address
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cable
access which is wonderful until you have a problem - then you can't get
Ted Turner or the President of Time-Warner on the phone.