> "It's either because the sugar water
solution stuck better to mites/bees or was more eagerly ingested by
the bees"

What exactly is the mechanism by which the oxalic acid in the trickle method
kills mites?
This is key to making some decisions about its use at this time of year,
especially as to
whether to crack the boxes in two box hives, which is fairly intrusive to a
nicely sealed
and tightly clustered unit.    How would ingestion work???

Also, the instructions I have for trickling are "35 grams per litre of
solution, and 5 ml per
line of bees with a maximum of 50 ml per colony".  But the number of lines
of bees is
dependent on temperature.  We had fairly good temperatures doing the first
couple of
thousand hives but today was down to minus eight and even strong colonies
did not not
have many "lines of bees".    We can't really wait for warmer temperatures
as even today
it was getting hard to get through the snow into the yards.   I understood
that oxalic
trickle could be done at cold temperatures.  Is that correct???

Regards
Stan

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