a Bill T snip followed > by my comments.. 
As far as the management of Varroa by hobby beekeepers, I have no issue
with the fact that they are more responsible for Varroa bombs harming local
beekeepers than commercial beekeepers, but only because of dispersal. I
have seen many commercial outfits when I tagged along with Tony on the
Blueberry barrens and they showed me I was not as bad a beekeeper as I
thought. So if you took those operations and spread them out, they would
rival the hobby beekeepers through force of numbers.

>
in most all of science there is such a thing as occam's razor... which basically states that you need not generate a complex or convoluted explanation when a simple answer works just fine.  sheer numbers (commercial hives vs hobbist) would suggest to me the origin of 'varroa bombs' (if they do exist and at this point as far as I can tell there is no real concrete evidence but lot of speculation that they do) is clearly on the commercial side of his equation.  the simple explanation may well be ineffective treatments or massive number of hives with the reason for the treatment being ineffective being a long list of plausible but KNOWN causes < varroa resistance to the treatment, treatment applied at the wrong time of year,  or at an improper temperature, or even lots of residual varroa hiding in capped cells.

the commercial folks would like to blame hobby beekeepers for ineffective treatments but common sense does not support this claim.  some research folks do float the claim of varroa bomb (again with little or no proof) as a shield for why their research programs have not 'solved' the issue.  personally I think when it comes to varroa there is no silver bullet or an 'engineering fix' to this problem.  imho it is a dance (pretty much like the Texas two step) some of us beekeeper shall continue to waltz.... that is two steps forward and one step back.... and until this dance is done it may be a good idea not to step on your partner's toes.

Gene in central Texas

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