Varroa Mite Detection

You need to detect the varroa mites early because much like cancer the best defense is detection and it spreads rapidly.It is preferable to check for mites about twice a year. To check for mites you can sample the brood, this seems like hard work if you don't have a lab. This article doesn't really tell you how you go about detecting the mites when you do sample the brood.The detection boards seem like a good idea but I am not sure that I would rely only on them. I really like the alcohol wash method, i is easy and reliable and can be done in just one visit. I also really like the icing sugar method because it implies that not all the bees are killed. It is also easy and fairly accurate. If there are only a few mites you can wait until after the honey is harvested but if there are more than a hundred you need to treat right away even if some honey is lost. And if there are more than a thousand mites the collapse is imminent and must be treated immediately. I am not sure if I just missed it but I did not read any where how to actually treat the infestation, only how to tell how many mites there were. This article was a little helpful but it did not give me the full story and it had some ambiguous words throughout that clouded the meaning.