Hi all

I am sorry to say Allen's work was fruitless.

However it has woken me up to consider what would be a sensible way to
tackle this.... My training leads me to think statistics my help, but the
variables we have to deal with here are many and in themselves wildly
variable.

I reckon You start with a colony that you know has varroa and then take
samples from this at 25, 50, 100, 200, 400  with a rigidly defined method of
selecting individual bees (ie. equal numbers from each frame or some other
repeatable pattern)  finally kill the colony and recover all the mites from
it, and then analyse your samples and decide on future sample size as a
result of this work.

Armed with that sort of empirical data... you can look at the statistics on
subsequent samplings that you know will then have valid results.


Best Regards & 73s... Dave Cushman, G8MZY
Beekeeping & Bee Breeding Website...
http://website.lineone.net/~dave.cushman