I know for a fact that if we were trying to raise mites, rather than suppress them, we would soon find that we had problems with providing the right environment. We would eventually find ourselves combating *their* diseases and predators in a struggle to maintain our mite populations. The reason I am sure of this is that we have had that problem with every other organism we have tried to encourage. As soon as we attempt to manage them and generate populations or production above the natural levels, we discover the factors that limit them in nature. Up to that point, we tend to assume there are no such limits. Penicillin was discovered by people who were having trouble culturing a troublesome bacterium in a lab and got to wondering what was 'spoiling' their attempts, causing them to have to discard plates, and forcing them repeatedly to try over. They discovered that other organisms on the medium were giving off chemicals that suppressed competitors' growth and thus giving them an edge over the desired culture. We found that some of these chemicals were not particularly poisonous to us and our livestock, and by imitating these chemicals, we have been able to take a page out of the fungus' book and to thus compete more effectively with many bacteria. To carry this experience to our problem with mites: we know intuitively that there *must* be many thousands of things that will inhibit varroa and tracheal mites' growth and reproduction. The problem is that even if we knew what they were, many, if not most, of these things are likely hard or very hard on other similar critters and bees are somewhat similar to mites in many respects. Hammers, extreme cold, ionizing radiation, most pesticides, and harsh chemicals are a few obvious mite controls that cannot be easily used on mites in the presence of bees due to the adverse effects on the bees. Nonetheless, there must be some things -- environmental, topical, or nutritional -- that have neutral or beneficial effects on bees, but adverse and hopefully fatal effects on the mites that concern us most. The key is identifying these factors. If we think of this as a filtering problem, then identifying the ways in which the mites differ from our bees is the most important first step to finding a new, permanent method of control. Of course the fact that humans are in the picture, narrows the field further, since any method discovered must be benign as far as humans administering the control is concerned, and also benign to humans encountering the bees or their products. Drone brood removal is one technique that takes advantage of some behavioural tendency of varroa. There must be thousands of other possible tricks we can use, if we can just determine more exactly where bees and mites differ. Mites, in their way are as interesting and important to people and many have been the subject of exhaustive study. Bees have been well studied by bee scientists, but I wonder how much interaction there is with experts on mites? Such interaction could be very fruitful. allen http://www.internode.net/HoneyBee/