PLB said, " They found many more drifted bees in varroa infested hives than varroa free hives. This seems to imply that the varroa infested bees are drifting more than healthy bees."

These two sentences seem in direct conflict to me.  If you find bees in varroa infested hives that came from other hives many times as often as you find bees in clean hives from varroa infested hives that says to me that healthy bees drift more than varroa infested bees.  Thus varroa infested hives drift less than healthy hives.

Or perhaps the data says that if you have a small number of infested hives compared to clean hives the infested bees are so distributed among clean hives that even if drifting is the same from infested and not infested hives the number that get to any given clean hive is quite low compared to non infested bees that get to infested hives?

I am totally confused.  All that seems clear to me is some clean hives can see a spike in late summer in some locations under some undefined conditions.  I have not personally seen that happen in my hives.  If I sample in July I typically see the same kind of counts in September in my hives in spite of having a close neighbor who generally does not treat.  Am I atypical because I run Minnesota Hygienic queens?  Have I just been lucky and all will change this fall?  Last year I put apivar strips on all my hives about March 20 and pulled them early May.  My July counts were zero to 2 mites/100 bees, the same as my mid September counts.  I had intended to do OAV in September but with the low counts I did nothing.  I had 5% winter deadouts and no sign I could see of DFW either last fall or this spring.

Dick


" Any discovery made by the human mind can be explained in its essentials to the curious learner."  Professor Benjamin Schumacher talking about teaching quantum mechanics to non scientists.   "For every complex problem there is a solution which is simple, neat and wrong."  H. L. Mencken

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