Hello Paul and Everyone,

I had a couple of large boxes of grapefruit leaves shipped to me from
Florida. My relatives there have a tree in their backyard that isn't
sprayed and they shipped the best grapefruit I have ever had wrapped in
green grapefruit leaves. I wanted to use the smoke as an easy way to
access the mite level in small cell  foundation based hives that I have
been playing with without contaminating the wax with chemical residues.

I used lots of smoke to completely disrupt hive activities when smoking
the hives with the grapefruit leaves. The leaves were mostly dry as I got
the fruit in late winter and smoked the bees in mid summer. They were
stored in a box in the dark in our very dry and cool Wyoming climate.

The smoke did drop a number of mites. When the hives were dusted later in
the day with powdered sugar the mite drop was much increased. The smoke
would drop about 10 to 30 percent of the mites that the powdered sugar
did.

The intense smoking also seemed to disorient the bees longer than the
"normal" pine/wood based smoke that I use.

I tried the grapefruit leaves on several other occasions with the same
results so now I used powdered sugar. I figure that the grapefruit smoke
only knocked down 30 percent of the mites on the bees at best. These
results differed greatly from the 90+ percent that the researchers
obtained from caged bees.

My question was whether the dried leaves made any difference. Maybe they
should have been very green.

Best Wishes
Dennis