Charles
If you can even understand what they are saying with the studies sentence structure, you are already far ahead of me.

For example
>The number of daughters per infesting mother decreases at higher rates of infestation per cell, but the proportion of such daughters with a mate rises sharply due to the higher probability of finding a male within multi-infested cells. The number of mated daughters per mother is maximal in cells with two foundress Varroa females.<

Is this what the above is saying?
The mites have few babies if more mites are in the cell.  Those fewer babies that are female can find two boys easier cause each might mother had one.
If one mite has seven daughters each in a cell and normal two of them are mated, then if two mothers in a cell only have three babies each but all of them are mated.  Two mother mite is the most that have mated daughters efficiantly and this changes with three and goes down with one.

That is what I get from it with my reading skills.  The last sentence sounds funny when put to a glenn transulation.


Randy mentioned it being easy to check for mels claim that mites load up but mel said he found it by accident cause it did not take the bees long to clean it up. It seems like it would be hard to time when to check cause even if you knew the math, you would have to know the exact time a queen started laying to use it.  I probly won't make an effort to check it anyway but have always wondered since I heard it.  Of course, even if I had an answer it would bring up ten more questions like "What impact would it make"  what was the number of mites that might reasonably find the first cells and ect ect.  So in the end, if I know it or not, what will happen will happen anyway.
Cheers
gww

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