> The emerging bees drop bits of wax when chewing the
> cell open. This does not make it impossible to count
> the mites just possibly adds to a potential migraine.

Here's a trick - get some of the super-wide food-service
type Saran Wrap (Sysco Food Services sells it nationwide),
and put it over the sticky board, wrapping it around the
edges.  This will allow you to place your finger over a
suspected mite and push.  Mites are hard, while bottom
board trash will compress.  It also allows one to get the
boards back to a more comfortable place for counting without
getting oil or Vaseline all over your vehicle upholstery.

> Why couldn't I establish a 72 hour count using the sum of
> three 24 hour counts?

No reason why not, other than the additional time/labor of
doing three counts, visiting the hive 3 times, etc.

> This would keep my boards from becoming overloaded. Also I
> have seen the mite drops cluster under the emerging brood.
> Over a 3 day period the emerging brood pattern moves throughout
> the hive. What happens if this is an area that is blanked out?

The blanked-out areas are much smaller than a typical brood
area, and as you are in PA, you can ask MaryAnn yourself what
her concerns would be about this approach, but regardless, we
need standards for counting mites, and this may be the only
well-documented attempt at a standard that has both been
subjected to the rigor of statistical analysis, and has been
consistently used in several studies, so perhaps we beekeepers
should simply accept it, and not try to "improve it".  The printed
cards say "Board Design 3 Copyright 2002", so it is clear that
tweaking has been done by Penn State and/or MAAREC.

In my view, the single biggest problem we face is the inability to
compare numbers between studies and between nearby beekeepers.  All
the talk of "thresholds" is made even more counter-productive by the
lack of a consensus on how to count mites. (Insert my prior rants
here about how a single mite-drop reading cannot possibly be a valid
basis for a treatment decision by definition.)

> Hive 2 on checkerboard would have only counted 36% then 49% then 35%
> of the mites on three different 24 hour periods in a two week span.

I think that MaryAnn and Nancy would advise you to do the counts on
three consecutive days.  Spreading out the days would fall outside
the abilities of what I would expect to be the statistical model used.

> However using a continuous grid I would question the necessity of
> a 72 hour count.

Well, a 24-hour count on a "continuous grid" was what I have been doing
ever since I built my first screened bottom, but this is exactly what
was shown to be misleading by the work cited by MaryAnn and Nancy.
(I hope that they will send me actual citations.  When they do, I
will get the papers, and post them somewhere, assuming author permission.)

Also, if anyone wants to help out, I would love to get as many high-resolution
digital photos of removed sticky boards as I can, along with whatever your
"count" was for that drop.  It would help if the sticky board itself was white
or light colored, and it would also help if the sticky board was roughly
parallel
to the front of the lens, and shot "square on" in fairly bright light.  I have
some image processing software that I have been using to count mites, and I am
hoping to test it against a large enough dataset to at least offer proof that,
if
it "reads low" or "reads high", it does so by a consistent percentage, and is a
valid tool for research use.  Cutting the labor required to count mites may
sound
silly, but when you are doing drop counts on 100 hives or so, it can take days
and
days. (The code is very good at "seeing" reddish-brownish and/or whitish ovals
among
all the much less oval-shaped hive trash, even when the ovals are partly
obscured,
but one must admit that a mite completely covered by hive trash can never be
seen.)


       jim  (Feng-Shui is not a belief system,
             its just a storage solution.)

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