Enter what you counted. The answer comes back as mites per 100 bees, which is the unit every published treatment threshold is written in. No signup, and nothing you type leaves your browser.
Enter a mite count to see your number.
Half cup and quarter cup are the standard scoops. This assumes an alcohol wash, which is the only method that reliably recovers enough of the mites for the result to mean what the threshold means.
Treat when a wash comes back at 3 mites per 100 bees or higher. Between 2 and 3 you are in watch territory: wash again on a short cycle and have a treatment ready, and plenty of beekeepers act at 2 rather than waiting.
In a half cup sample of about 300 bees, 6 mites is 2 percent and 9 mites is 3 percent. The late summer and autumn counts carry the most weight, because those are the bees that raise your winter bees.
One reading describes one day. It is the direction across several counts that tells you what is actually happening in the colony.
Half a cup of bees, levelled off, taken from a frame of open brood in the brood nest where the nurse bees are. Check the queen is not on that frame first. Swirl gently for a minute rather than shaking: just enough movement that every bee is turning over. Vigorous agitation keeps the mites stirred back up into the bees and you undercount.
A sugar roll spares the bees but recovers only 70 to 90 percent of the mites, and it reports in the same unit as the threshold. That is what makes it worse than no count at all: it hands you a number that looks comparable and sits below your real load, so a colony at 3.5 reads 2.8 and goes untreated.
ColonyTrack keeps every wash on the hive it came from, so you can see which way the count is moving rather than judging one number on its own. It also tracks a multi-application treatment course and tells you when a hive's last count has gone stale.