Hi Stan:

I must plead not guilty to being good at monitoring for mites. In the past I 
did very little and had disastrous results as a result. I never lost an 
entire yard, as Allen did, but about every third year there would be a huge 
die off. Since then more monitoring has been done both with detergent washes 
and with the sticky boards. I  have built some bottom boards with slatted 
racks and some with screens. They make the sticky boards very easy to use, 
so I am going to use them exclusively.

The reason I used the dribbling method last spring was a failure of my 
inverter for powering the 110 volt vaporisers. I did not intend to dribble 
as a usual thing and did not monitor the results ( I wish I had). My mite 
counts at the end of the summer were about 55 per day, so it must have been 
fairly effective. The vaporiser method seems very effective with hives 
showing 50 mites per day dropping 500 per day for the three days after 
treatment. I have had little success with the formic acid treatments, likely 
because the daytime temperatures are too cold here in the fall. They are 
also more expensive than oxalic.

The vaporisers that are inserted into the hives are slow to use . I made up 
six of them and have two heating, two cooling and two being filled at the 
same time. This is about as many as one person can keep track of. This 
winter I built five units for vaporising the acid and injecting it into the 
hives with a blower. Two of these were similar to the ones developed by Cor 
DeWitt here in Alberta. The other three are a simplified design that seems 
to work reasonably well. They have nozzles that fit into the 1" augur holes 
in my brood chambers and are quicker to use than the inserted ones.

I have had an occasional whiff of oxalic acid vapour. It causes an 
instantaneous cough reflex and I doubt if one could take a second breath of 
it. I have been using a dust mask and lab splash goggles since then and have 
had no trouble. The dust mask is effective because the vapour condenses (?) 
as soon as it contacts the filter media. Before I do another treatment I 
will get a full face respirator.

                                    Best regards

                                    Donald Aitken

             ***********************************************
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