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Hello everyone, I've maxed out my beekiness today. I've done a sugar shake test 13mites/300ish bees gives me 4% level in my new, and only, hive. I've done my first oxalic acid vaporisation ¼ teaspoon (1g) for my only brood box, as per kiwimana, and went well. Best I've ever done infact... I'm going to re-treat every 5-7 days for the next 3 treatments and retest my mite count after that (fingers crossed). It's amazing that despite this method being "mainstream" for the many years now, and well ahead of Europe's dribble method, that there is still a bit of variation in advice. I suspect it's a classic example of shining the cat & everyone does it slightly differently with the end result. Bee Culture recently recommended 2.25g/treatment/FD bloodless box, that's almost double most of the others. But it was single treatment of bloodless hive. Kiwimana recommends ¼ teaspoon per hive, others 1g (same as ¼ teaspoon) per FD brood box (assuming most "typical hives" have 1 or 2 FD boxes for brood. Scientific beekeeping hasn't really done anything on it yet, as it wasn't approved for the US when he wrote his things. I get why this technique isn't necessarily commercially viable, it's a bit time consuming, but it must be a good thing for everyone if hobbyists minimise resistance by choosing these sorts of techniques and only use strips for rescue. So it would be nice if some concrete advice on how to could be found. Also, in NZ, what do people consider acceptable levels of mite? 1%, 2% or some other figure? Thanks
