I have no desire to get into the small cell debate, however I will address
an excellent question raised by Jim:

 but his claims were
> based upon either 48-hr or 24-hr passive mite drop counts
>
> his drop counts cannot even be compared with the standard
> "72-hr drop and divide by 3" approach


I sincerely apologize if I was not clear.  All but one count was in the
48-hr range.  All count periods were measured to the nearest half hour, and
adjusted to the 24-hr equivalent.  I find that there is a problem with 72-hr
counts due to hive trash making mites difficult to count, and sometimes
giving them the opportunity to crawl off the trash-strewn sticky board.  I
used the 48-hr period intentionally, and other reviewers of my protocol had
no problem with it.  I doubt that weather was a factor in the counts, since
there was not much weather change during the test period, and since weather
would be expected to affect all colony mite drops equally.

As Jim stated in a previous post, the passive mite drop is generally
considered the "Gold Standard" in measuring varroa levels.  I followed his
advice in designing the trial--thinking that the data would not be
questioned.

I also did not present means and sd's, in order to allow readers to inspect
each colony's individual data, and to draw their own conclusions.

I did not run the trial to "prove" anything.  I simply wanted to collect
some sorely-missing rigorous data from a controlled trial.

I am as curious as the next beekeeper, and willing to due the hard work to
get answers.  This trial was unfunded, and again I apologize if any part of
the protocol was not to everyone's standards.

Randy Oliver

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