Bill T's comments

>I use an OAV treatment to get mite drop and that tells me the status of my
hive.

Ok, but that will generally only tell them if the colony has some number of phoretic mites which is more a function of the infestation level and how many frames of capped brood there are. 

>My experience is that I get as good or better numbers with OAV than the alcohol washes, and the alcohol washes were done by the State Inspector

An accelerated drop and a wash may correlate but I wouldn't know how. The wash samples 300 bees instantly and the accelerated drop measures the entire phoretic mite population and takes days to do so.  If I wanted to back into what I would expect a pretreatment wash number to be based on an accelerated drop, I have no idea how that would be done. Same is true with starting with a wash number and trying to predict the accelerated drop numbers. 

Please, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying what you are doing isn't working for you. If you have found something that works great and the issue is settled for you. But I'm sure you don't mind a little healthy skepticism concerning on how the numbers you rely on relate to other beekeepers. In my experience, there is no prescription when it comes to mites.  

Good to hear you're recovering nicely and looking to get back at it again.  


Bill Hesbach
Cheshire CT  

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