On 03/09/2012 21:57, randy oliver wrote:
>>> Anyone else had similar experiences?
> Obviously, either the mites in Canada grip tighter, or Allen just doesn't
> shake it like he used to.
>
> I tried a number of times when the sugar shake first came out.  I recovered
> about 70% of the mites by sugar, and the rest by alcohol.
Impressed by your and allen's results we did our experiment:
we shaked 59 jars with 1 spoon of icing sugar and more or less 100 ml of 
bees in a 390 ml jar with full net lid, quite hard for 90 seconds.

Then we put  in the same jars more or less 150 ml of a mixture of 50% 
alcohol, 50% water and some strong soap. After a time ranging from 6 
hours to 48 hours we shaked hard for 3 minutes and filtered, still 
washing with running water and moving and "massaging" dead bees for 2-3 
minutes more.

The result is that sugar dislodged a mean of 94.9% of total mites, 
standard deviation 7.8%.
Only in 4 cases efficacy was under 80%, minimum 74%.

We counted bees from 30 jars and found that the mean was 313 bees, 
standard deviation 43.

>
> When I recently watched Katie Lee demo the sugar shake, she shook the jar
> so hard that I was surprised that any bees survived!
In another time we put the bees shaked bees under the hive roof with 
communication with the supers. After 1 hour more or less 10 bees (3%) 
were dead under the roof. Of course I don't know which was the life 
expectancy of the others that had enough energy to escape from there...

-- 
Umberto Vesco
DVM, PhD
Italy

             ***********************************************
The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software.  For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html

Guidelines for posting to BEE-L can be found at:
http://honeybeeworld.com/bee-l/guidelines.htm