As a very inexperienced counter of varroa mites, I proceeded as
follows to check that I was finding them properly on the sticky
board:  first, using just a 2x OptiVisor (my middle-aged vision is
poor!), I circled with a black Sharpie every spot that I thought
was probably a mite.  Then I brought the board to a 15x stereo
microscope, and checked each of my circled spots: the vast majority
of them were indeed mites or parts of mites, fortunately for my
detection abilities, but unfortunately for the hive - I'll have to
deal with that.

(For completeness: I also checked my first pass by doing a microscopic
pass on the middle area of the board, where most mites had dropped,
and found just a couple that I had missed on my first pass.  So
I'm actually learning to do this; good.)

Anyway, here's my main question: most of the objects that I counted
as mites were actually just the carapace, like a hollowed-out half
football.  There were very few mites with their innards still present.
Why is that?

Under the microscope I saw a couple of objects that looked like
the varroa carapaces but were translucent instead of reddish brown;
I did *not* count them as varroa.  Should I have?  What else could
they have been?

Finally, while using the microscope, I saw one tiny insect that
was about an order of magnitude smaller than the varroa, was oval,
but had two appendages at the narrow end instead many along the
wide side.  Was that a tracheal mite?  Should I panic?  I probably
shouldn't, I suppose, since I'm going to treat with MAQS, which
should take care of any tracheal mites that might be present...


Anne.

P.S.: I was very satisfied to see a couple of half-earwigs on the
sticky board.  I had been dismayed last week to find a few live
earwigs on top of the inner cover; it's nice to have confirmation
that my bees know how to deal with earwigs.  Go, bees, go !  :-)

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