Varroa Mite Count : 48 hrs later

 

The trays were retrieved 48 hours after they were put in. As you can see a bunch of debris fell through my mesh floor and landed on my sticky wax paper. Note: the left tray is turned around the wrong way!

 I found a bug crawling around in the pollen etc... and took a picture of it because I was worried that it may be a hive beetle. I looked into my reference books (ie, Beekeeping For Dummies); and found out that it was definitely not a hive beetle.

Take a look at the different sources of pollen that the bees were collecting over the last 2 days. It looks like there must be four or five different sources. I tried pollen for the first time tonight. It was actually really good. I am going to have to make a pollen trap to collect some pollen for my own consumption.

The tally:
The Green hive: had a whooping 90 mites in 48 hours. Which makes a 24 hour count of 45. This is not good. It means that I will have to treat and I was planning on actually making a partial split of the hive.
The White hive: had only 10 mites in 48 hours. Which is actually really good but I think it is wrong. Well, the count is correct but I had reversed the boxes on April 5th; so the brood is primarily in the top chamber and the mites would be dropping down into the bottom box and would likely reattach themselves to passing bees at a much higher rate. I am likely going to start treating as soon as possible.