Hi all.
 
Allen Dick makes good comments about the proper way to evaluate the
effectiveness of MO, or any other miticide.  Without a properly designed
study any reports of success are merely anecdotal, and may turn out like
many of the other miticides that have been tried by beekeepers ie., they
have unreliable effectiveness, cause queen losses, harm colony clustering
in cold weather, add stress to the colony, change bee behavior, colonies
continue to die at 25 to 50 percent, and beekeepers find the registered
products are preferrable because they control mites even if they are more
costly.  Without proper and complete research including published data, all
the recommendations and use of various treatments, may only result in
temporary "good looking bees," when what really happened is that a previous
legal treatment reduced the mite populations to a point one wouldn't expect
colony loss anyway.  Without measuring mite levels, and other factors, pre,
and post treatment for several months, maybe up to two years, the benefit
or impact of a mite treatment is only circumstantial, and may not reveal
reality.
 
Walt Barricklow's questions do not currently have answers, that I know of.
I fear that not enough attention is being paid to miticide residue
collection in brood comb over time, the impact on larval survivability, and
the larval and queen pheromonal environment of the hive, which may affect
many bee behaviors, queen retention, supercedure, and colony demise.
Unless all these actions are studied, and monitored in research hives, I
fear that we will not be able to get to the bottom of what is happening in
bee hives today.
 
Walt's questions need to be researched.  The complications resulting from
putting one chemical in a bee hive raises the issue of who will investigate
all these side issues to the formulation and carrier of a treatment.  Maybe
the chemical (MO) does have some effect on mites but we need to know about
all these other impacts before we can ascertain whether a miticide is cost
effective, or harmful to other aspects of bee biology and behavior, which
might make the miticide a poor choice as a mite control.  After all, all
these products are foreign to a bee hive, hence they may be suspected to
cause some harmful effects even if they are human food stuffs.  It doesn't
much matter to me whether MO is approved as a food or not.
 
The whole environment of the colony needs to be studied, and its genetic
variability.   From what I have observed over the last 20 years in
thousands of bee hives with thousands of queens from many sources, it is
apparent that the problem is not just economics or mites, it is the genetic
quality of our stock.  It appears that this is the one common denominator
in all the beekeeping problems I've seen.
 
James C. Bach
WSDA State Apiarist
Yakima WA
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