> ...condition of the fallen mites in the control hives. Are they old and > decrepit or beaten up by grooming bees and on their way out anyway, or are > they lively, virile mites that you'd be glad to have fall out of your hive? They vary from immature to active to old and to dead mites. Immatures fall down since a mite's development stops when the cell is uncapped and the bee emerges. FWIW, if a pupa dies, and thus does not emerge on schedule, I assume the mites keep developing on the carcass until house bees uncap, since Kenn showed us the mites can live quite a while on dead brood. That's all the more reason to have hygienic bees -- and fast ones too. Active adults fall due to a number of factors, including random chance. Old and weak or dying mites, naturally drop to the floor eventually. Some bees damage mites more than other strains, and in such hives many chewed mites may be found on the floor. All in all, the study of floors and what drops is fascinating. Look closely and you will wonder what you are looking at. You may remember looking at sticky boards when you were here, and all the odd things we saw. Sticky boards are stick partly to keep the active mites from climbing back up. I saw a talk at Apimondia where the researcher showed mite traps and experiments to see how many mites dropping would go back up, and how far. I can't recall the speaker, or the details, but the results were pretty amazing. > Aaron Morris - thinking the more we know, the more there is that we don't > know! That's true, and much of what we know is wrong, or only true in certain situations. allen