Jim:
But whatever happened to the "mite leveling" claims?  :)
I really wanted to hear how a few mites on drifting bees
could result in mite populations that were even close to
the mite populations in the hives from which the mites
"drifted in".

Reply:
We have gone over this and over this over on the
orgnicbeekeepers list in discussion. It is nothing new and
all beekeepers should already be aware of it,....that is
the SC hives taking more of the heat, due to drift, to
bring down the population of mites in the LC hives. Bees
are social animals and therefore SC hives helping the LC
ones survive for lack of other words. If the controls were
good here in this experiment, then plans should have been
in place to avoid drifting, like has been talked about
being done over in the Nordic States so as not to skew
results as to what is actually happening. But again this is
nothing new and has been talked about before, even here I
think on BEE-L, about seeing whole sheets of brood
uncapped, with mites first season at broodnest turn over
time in fall, with other beekeepers beeyards all around us
on the Santa Cruz crashing. And this could therefore mean
even higher mite counts then what you are thinking about in
this experiment. Nothing new really!

Dee





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