Counting Mite Drops, Considering When One Stops , Part 1

 I've written to my beekeeping friends, in a far away county, and none of whom I know personally, but all whom share a passion for beekeeping, and greater knowledge than I, that I'm thinking this may be my last year at it- that if I can't make progress against mites, and hive loss, I'll need to give up. Not that further persistence wouldn't pay off- and I don't mean to dissuade any beginning beekeeper reading this from starting out- as surely there are solutions ahead. 

This is my 27th year keeping bees. At first a few hives, then incrementally more. For a few years I kept 40, but that seems like my limit.  And though mites have been in my hives all the years I've kept bees, only in the last 5 years have the totally overwhelmed them, each year worse, despite my efforts- which I think, you'd agree, have been  aggressive.  But I made- I think- some very serious errors in the past two years in my zeal, one in believing in FA, another in believing in OAV, and I, screwing up with both.

In my zeal to kill- or at least, control, the mite- I've come to the at least temporary conclusion, that despite careful observation, lots of data, lots of reading, lots of experimenting, I still am as in the dark as ever.  

I spent last year with OAV, a large amount of treatments and cycles of treatment, and of 25 hives (40 the year before), I think I'm pressing to 12. So I sooth my bad feeling with trying to take data which would give me a window into the mite.

Here's a minor series of counts- for just two hives outside my work window (2 left of the 9 that were once there),  I treated with 5g each (a lot of OAV- I think essential) on February 26, and then counted the mite drop s often as I could (next time, more often), to see how it works exactly. I've done this before daily, but twice a day shows more:

And to my surprise, despite a serious broodless treatment on Christmas day- I realize that to get 160 dead mites- means I had a lot more mites survive than I had thought. To see how many, I used a modified RO spreadsheet I created to test this, In this spreadsheet, I added a one-shot OA category, that only kills phoretic mites, which doesn't do a lot, but it all depends on the starting mite count. When I put it at about 200, I got a similar number. Of course, without further treatment, one can see the outcome here- really bad.