We talk about 30% of mites being phoretic and 70% in brood at any given time.  I got to wondering if the ratio is really that constant?  For example does a sudden few days of hot weather induce a bunch of extra mites to move into brood (or inhibit a bunch from moving into brood).  Does a strong nectar flow impact such movement in some way?  How about a rain?

Has anyone generated data where they simply did a mite count every third day for two or three weeks?  If so, how much do the counts jump around?  Or do they follow some fairly tight trend line?

The practical reason to worry about this is to understand what a wash count means.  If that ratio should bump around very much with some other variable a 2% wash count today could mean something rather different than a 2% four days from now.  I suppose someone has good data on this but do not remember seeing it.



Dick

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