Our daily inspection of falling mites during treatment with OAE raises questions.
Here you can see number of falling mites each day in the 5 colonies examined.
What do you make of this? Is it good or is it bad that all those mites are falling down? Im a bit puzzled how to interpret whats going on. If enough number of mites dies, due to oxalic OAE treatment, that would reduce the number that could reproduce. But when should we expect that trend brake? Ok Randy Oliver says 50 days to take effect. Or are the mites building up out of control here?
Still very interesting that colony 29 and 75 have no mites at all.
Yet another observation, BeeScanning app says infestation is 1 % in both nr 3 and 75. What does that mean? 1% out of say bee strength 20 000 bees would equal 200 mites. We dont know yet the % of the phoretic mites that drop but seems unlikely that about 100% would drop each day. Conclusion 1% may be an underestimation of actual numbers of present mites.
To be continued. We dont know where this ends but will keep examining.
