> Just curios James,  which side of this Global
> warming debate do you fall on??  

I've never seen much of a "debate".
Here's an excellent summary of the unvarnished facts:
http://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/

But I am a mere simple physicist, so while I can tell you how a cloud turns
into a thunderstorm, and why rainbows have the shape and color order they
have, and why the sky looks blue, I don't have more than a layman's grasp of
"the big picture climate data".  I pray we are all wrong.  I am glumly
confident we are not.  

> differences in mite monitoring is based a 
> lot around how many hives you have,

I agree that yards must be represented by sentinel hives in larger
operations, but I do not agree that one is well-served by making a decision
based upon a single reading, isolated from contextual reference. Why can't
one do multiple readings on that sentinel hive?  Maybe paint the bottom
board and cover red so that it stands out among its brethren, even after
several pollination placements.  

I only averaged 600 hives, and I could not afford the time to count mites
for every hive myself.  What I COULD do was to screen every hive in fall
after treatment to see who has been out robbing, and brought back varroa,
and this is easy to do with corrugated plastic election signs, cans of PAM
cooking spray, and Tupperware containers of denatured alcohol.  Varroa float
on denatured alcohol, so one can get a decent 3-day drop and both screen and
triage in one easy motion, mere seconds per hive for both installation of
the varroa board, and gestalt assessment of the results.    This sort of
work shows one just how good all the varroa treatments currently on the
market are, and how much of the "failure" of these treatments is a failure
of the beekeeper to pay attention to his hives after treatment.  

> and how willing to kill bees you are.

Careful! Don't feed the PETA trolls! 

It is said that it is impossible to open and inspect a hive without some bee
mortality as collateral damage, and I am sure that the claim is correct.
This is an existential issue of beekeeping - most often, if we do nothing,
harm directly results from our inaction or delayed action.  If we act,
knowing we will do some amount of harm, we must try to minimize the harm we
do in our efforts to care for the bees.  So the problem is in working out a
rational view of acting in the best interest of "The Hive", and "the
greatest good".  It is a calculus of comparative morality, and I've only
seen Sufis address and handle these problems with rigor and elegance.  This
may sound like trivial beard-stroking self-indulgent navel contemplation,
but some of us view beekeeping as more than a business or hobby. It can be
an exercise in ethics.  

> Those of us with MANY hives find 
> it impractical to try to watch mite 
> growth in individual, and need a 
> threshold,  however arbitrary it may be.

But that is not a true "threshold", is it?  You have a single number, devoid
of context.  IPM texts define thresholds in terms of "pests PER acre" or
"pests PER plant".    This gives a valid ratio of pests to victims, and
allows one to make an informed decision. This is a proper threshold.  But
beekeepers keep tap-dancing around the lack of the "per plant" part, as all
they have is a count of pests.  This is as bad as having your banker make a
loan decision based upon "debt" rather than the "debt to equity ratio".    

Beekeepers can guesstimate the hive population, but no beekeeper speaks of
"mites per frame of brood" or "mites per estimated bee". The extension
agents gave in to pressure from beekeepers who impatiently demanded "just
give me a number".  As Jerry's results confirmed, the inherent problem of a
single measurement is that it tells you worse than nothing.  (Note that
anyone who points out that everyone is tap-dancing is subjected to an
attempted beating to silence the critique.  This just happened in this
thread.)

So, you need to compare the number to something, and the easiest thing to
compare it to is to a prior set of readings.

Like the climate issue, there's no debate about this either, at least among
scientists.  The only thing that sounds like "debate" is the incessant noise
of the tap-dancing beekeepers, and the occasional pummeling of anyone who
has the audacity to stop tap-dancing along.

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