Allen, Dennis welcome to the club This welcome is of course mixed, you have my sympathy If you ever have bees again it will be more difficult For example, the equipement is contaminated, but there is no point to replacing ALL because you will never get ALL the virus, so you only gain a year or 2. OTOH it is probably worthwhile to reduce the virus load, do a bleach spray, and be sure to burn any with dead brood Very good description Dennis, matchs what I have seen very well Did you say where you thought it came from? >last year, the varroa count ballooned. Did you do a wash later? Do you know how much is "ballooned" One other thing, if either of you can bring yourself to do it? Scrape a feacal spot, if any exist, re-hydrate, and sniff If it knocks your socks off, as I suspect that it will, then describe for our amusment Bill's suggestion has merit IMO, but I'm not aware of any studies ccd vrs formic (in any sense) But last year 2/3 of my hives got no formic, lost 1/11 (in that yard) It did sort of look like a ccd event(disorganized weak cluster, no corpses) If anyone reading this had a ccd event when formic was on or recent, the please disabuse me of this opinion (that ccd does not like formic) dave BTW 1st pollen Tillsonburg April 9 FF april 10?? likely *********************************************** The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html Guidelines for posting to BEE-L can be found at: http://honeybeeworld.com/bee-l/guidelines.htm