Sticky Board = Backwards Thinking?

[GSF]

I sent something out to a couple of you via pm. It was from another internet site so I wasn't sure if posting it here would be in violation of something or at least bad taste, anyway;

Ran across an interesting thought about sticky boards. It was said that sticky boards don't accurately count mites during a natural mite drop. The thought was it only counts the unhealthy mites and not the healthy ones. The healthy ones don't drop near as much as the unhealthy ones. So when one counts they are only counting the sick mites not the healthy ones. Makes sense or does it?

[Robo]

I personally don't believe that natural mite drop is significant in the grand scheme.  Unfortunately,  it is taken for granted by those who think SBB are an effect way to deal with mites.

[melliferal]

If we accept this premise:

The healthy ones don't drop near as much as the unhealthy ones.

...as true, it makes perfect sense.

But the question is, how true is that premise?

This is something I don't think we as beekeepers can investigate.  We can collect dropped mites via sticky-boards and undropped mites via sugar-shake, but some entomologist with a varroa specialty would have to study the mites to tell us whether the ones on the sticky board were any healthier than the ones in the sugar shake.  Has any of this kind of research been done yet?

[Kathyp]

i wouldn't bet the farm on a sticky board mite count, however....the number of mites on your bottom board does give you an indication of your mite load.  even if those that drop are unhealthy, if you have a lot down there you can bet that you have a bunch in your hive.  on the other hand, i have never found a huge mite load in a hive that didn't have a pretty good mite drop.

i like the slide in board in my screened bottoms for just that reason.  they are easy to pull and take a quick look.  what i find is one part of the evidence i use for decision making.

[merince]

Natural mite drop has more issues than just counting healthy vs. unhealthy hives, for example it will also show greater drops with bigger colonies. It is correlated with the colony infestation level, but a sugar or an ether roll is a much better measure.