Living with it

There is no permanent fix for varroa, only a repeating cycle:

• Count the mites.
• Treat, if the count crosses the threshold.
• Count again later in the season, to see whether it worked.

Skipping a year because the colony looked fine last time is how the cycle breaks. Left alone entirely, an infestation does not plateau at some tolerable level, it compounds year over year the same way it compounds week over week, and untreated colonies very commonly collapse within one to two years, not because varroa is inevitable but because nothing was ever done about it. None of this needs to be dramatic.