>> How do you know the starting counts?
>
> As you know, I favor alcohol wash of ~300 bees taken from a brood
> frame.

I think we have established that this is just a guess -- maybe a good
one --but a guess just the same.

Can you comment on how other researchers compute efficacy and if there
is an agreed method or if varying methods are used.

I recall seeing a presentation from Ontario where the controls showed
what seemed to be an efficacy, and IMO, that would appear to be silly.

When I was doing drops, I assumed that the efficacy should be calculated
by the total count during treatment and after the clean-up treatment at
the end, although that has it s problems too, as it counts the number of
mites killed over time, some of which were bred during the treatments.

I guess my question is whether all the various researchers use
comparable methods for computing efficacy or is maybe we could be
looking at apples and oranges when comparing the numbers published.

Seems to me that this is a very important question.

I'm addressing this to the professional scientists reading BEE-l.

I know there are at least ten.  Will we get ten different answers?

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