>... In a natural drop, if brood is present, about half of >the mites that drop are ones coming out of emerging brood, that would not >survive for more than a few hours (Lobb 1997 Mortality of Varroa jacobsoni >Oudemans during or soon after the emergence of worker and drone honeybees, >Apidologie 28:367). That is good information. We sorta know that by looking at dropped mites, but it is nice to have an authority look at the question. (Going off-track for a second: Another thing of that sort that I cannot get anyone to comment about is that when comparing dead mite counts under cappings in formic-treated hives with dead mite counts under cappings in controls, we notice that there are significant number of dead mites under cappings in non-treated hives. What causes that????) >... What I was saying was that >the accelerated drop caused as many mites to fall, as natural drop would in >6 days. This wasn't meant to imply that 34% of actual, viable phoretic >mites drop in 6 days. OK. If we accept that almost half the mite drop over six days will be non-viable mites that were not part of the phoretic population at the moment of treatment, then tonaturally drop a number equal to 34% of the phoretic population number over six days, we would have see a drop of roughly 34/6~=6% a day. Even if half that 6% were non-viable mites emerging during the six days, that would still require a daily natural drop of around 3% of the total mite population. That seems high to me under most conditions. What am I missing? >Wow, you are right! I've given ppt presentations with step by step photos >so many times, that I thought that I had put them into an article. I will >try to get them onto my site (I'm sending you a ppt of them). Thanks. Very instructive. *********************************************** 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 Guidelines for posting to BEE-L can be found at: http://honeybeeworld.com/bee-l/guidelines.htm