A Mr Borst snip...
I have never been a fan of sticky boards and mite drops.

Et replies...
We have largely stopped using these at the Texas A&M Bee Lab (Rangel Lab).  I cannot say I ever cared for this process myself.

Some of the earliest articles I read in the ABJ concerning counting varroa (using three different methods and I think dating back to the late 1980) suggest to me directly that ALL the methods used at that time were subject to being highly inaccurate.  Quite literally any of the usable field monitoring methods would only give you 1/3 of the varroa in the sample itself (the samples were later reexamined in the lab with a scope to get some idea of total varroa count in the sample).  I should add here that proper statistical methods informs me that taking one sample to estimate a population still leaves you with a confidence level of 0 (ie n-1).  So to remedy this problem you simply need to do multiple samples of the same hive.  This is of course add to the time required for monitoring and at least at some scale of honeybee may make this remedy impractical.      

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