Counting

There are two honest ways to count mites and one that flatters you into complacency. An alcohol wash takes a sample of about three hundred and fifty bees, half a cup, shaken from a brood frame rather than scooped from the entrance, because nurse bees carry a more representative mite load than foragers do.

Swirled in alcohol for a few minutes, the mites let go, and you count what washes through a mesh into a white pan against your starting bee count. That gives you mites per hundred bees, a real rate.

A sticky board under a screened bottom, by contrast, only counts mites that happened to fall off on their own that day, a number that tracks colony size and brood volume as much as it tracks infestation.