Sporadically. And always before my treatment windows.
Alcohol.
Having varroa.
I'm pretty much going to treat 3 times a year no matter what: in spring, when the supers come off in July and in late fall regardless of the number of mites. I'm not removing supers in the middle of a season because of mite loads, thats just going to cause my bees to run out of space and swarm, which might be a good thing to reduce the mite load but not what I want to happen.
If I really ran through and entire apiary and none of the hives had any mites I might skip treatment but that hasn't happened yet. And since all the products say treat a whole apiary if one has mites they all get treated anyway because there is always that one hive.
My testing is more to see how many mites I have before treatment so I can know if it worked when I test afterwards and don't have to try something else.
Sporadically. And always before my treatment windows.
Alcohol.
Having varroa.
I'm pretty much going to treat 3 times a year no matter what: in spring, when the supers come off in July and in late fall regardless of the number of mites. I'm not removing supers in the middle of a season because of mite loads, thats just going to cause my bees to run out of space and swarm, which might be a good thing to reduce the mite load but not what I want to happen.
If I really ran through and entire apiary and none of the hives had any mites I might skip treatment but that hasn't happened yet. And since all the products say treat a whole apiary if one has mites they all get treated anyway because there is always that one hive.
My testing is more to see how many mites I have before treatment so I can know if it worked when I test afterwards and don't have to try something else.