As is so often the case as I ponder a response to a thread and then see my points more succinctly put out the next day I again thank Bill Hesbach for his post.

Samuel Ramsey made his discovery by looking in the varroa's digestive tract and seeing what they were feeding on rather then accepting the universal assumption that it was haemolymph. I had the great pleasure of hearing his presentation at Galveston last year and had a brief personal talk after.

It seems to me the truly groundbreaking advance with the lithium salts as a systemic varroaside would be to get it into the beebread and jelly (in non harmful doses of course) that the nurses feed to larva and pupa. That could perhaps be in sub or some other feed source or bait or ???? In any event if we could kill or disrupt the varroa breeding cycle in the capped cells rather than depending on killing phoretic mites me may actually have the problem licked. What sweet dreams! 

Paul Hosticka
Dayton WA

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