> Calderon published a paper in 1999 on how to count a stickyboard without counting every mite using a method of stratified random sampling.

In the paper, he concludes: "These results demonstrate that subsampling can reduce the amount of time required to determine the number of mites on a sticky-board by approximately one half."

I find that somewhat funny, because when I worked at the Lab, we were told to count every mite. We had hundreds of sticky boards and sometimes there were thousands of mites on them, mixed with every sort of debris and gobs of vaseline. Personally, I think mite drop is skewed by cluster size, density of cluster, etc. No method is perfect but I prefer Medhat's over any other. Besides which, I think the correct approach is to sample 10%* of the colonies and if ANY of them is over the threshold, treat the whole yard.
 
* this is the rule we used in NYS apiary inspection: do 10% unless there were ten or fewer hives in the yard. Then do them all. 

PLB

             ***********************************************
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