Since I've not been seeing any mites on broken drone brood and thinking my colonies are exceptionally clean this year, I tested some colonies with Bill T's sticky board before and after procedure. I selected 10 colonies at random and did a 48-hour sticky board natural drop which only showed two mites- one each on two separate colonies with the remaining 8 at zero. I then used my ProVap 110 on the same colonies and checked them again to see the if the phoretic kill would invalidate the zero drops but it didn't. All 10 colonies showed zero mites after treatment. All these colonies overwintered and were last treated with OAV in November 2017. I also did OAV three times at 5-day intervals last July when I ran out of formic acid. I don't know if it's the bees, the season, or the OAV but I can't remember overwintered colonies this clean. 


Bill Hesbach
Cheshire CT

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