If you have kept bees for more than a season, you already know that varroa is the problem. Everything else — temperament, supersedure, propolis on your gloves — is downstream of how well you track and respond to mite pressure. The numbers matter, the timing matters, and what you do with the numbers matters more than either one alone.

This is how I track varroa, what I learned by tracking it badly first, and the small set of habits that make the data actually useful.

Why does varroa tracking get neglected?

Mostly because it is the part of beekeeping that is least fun. You are sticky, the bees are loud, and counting mites in a jar is the opposite of finding the queen. The honest answer is that the friction is real and the discipline is hard — and that is exactly why a logging tool that takes the friction out of the recording part earns its keep.

The cost of skipping varroa tracking is high and back-loaded. By the time you notice the colony is in trouble, your treatment window has narrowed, your options are worse, and your winter losses have already been priced in.

What is the right way to count mites?

Three methods are in common use, and they trade off accuracy against speed. Worth knowing before you pick one: the Honey Bee Health Coalition recommends only the first two, and treats the third as a less reliable check to be used as secondary confirmation rather than as a decision tool in its own right.

Alcohol wash. Sample 300 bees from a brood frame, shake in alcohol, count fallen mites. Kills the sample but is the most accurate snapshot. A count of 3 mites / 300 bees is a 1% infestation — which is the action figure during dormancy and population increase, and half the peak-population figure (see the table below).
Sugar shake. Same sample size, no alcohol. Bees survive. Less accurate — it reads low, because mites stay stuck to sticky bees — and more prone to operator error if the shake is not vigorous.
Sticky board (24-hour drop). Place under a screened bottom board, count natural mite drop after 24 hours. Easy and non-destructive but heavily affected by hive size, brood activity, and ambient temperature. Best for trend tracking, not for absolute thresholds.

I use alcohol wash for the cycle-of-record counts (early summer, mid-summer, late summer, before winter feeding) and sticky boards for in-between checks when something feels off.

How often should I check?

A defensible minimum is four checks per year, timed to the colony's life cycle:

Spring buildup, when populations are climbing and mites are climbing faster.
Mid-summer, before the main flow ends and the brood break that follows.
Late summer / early fall, before you start feeding for winter — this is the most consequential check of the year.
Pre-winter, after your fall treatment, to confirm it actually worked.

If you have a mite-vulnerable yard or a year of high local pressure, double this. The data point that matters most is the trend between checks, not any single count.

What mite level actually triggers a treatment?

The figures published by the Honey Bee Health Coalition are the ones I work to, and the important thing about them is that they are phase-dependent, not one number. From Table 1 of Tools for Varroa Management, 9th edition (2026), where the percentage is mites per 100 adult bees:

Colony phase	Immediate control not needed	Promptly control
Dormant	under 1%	1% or above
Population increase	under 1%	1% or above
Peak population	under 2%	2% or above
Population decrease	under 2%	2% or above

Two things worth flagging. First, they changed recently: the 8th edition (2022) put the peak-population action line above 3%, and the 9th edition moved it to 2% and tightened the population-increase phase from 2% to 1%. If you learned a figure a few years ago, check it against the current guide. Second, the Coalition says plainly that "mite thresholds are an evolving science and are often situationally and regionally specific," and recommends consulting a local apiary inspector or extension service — which is the correct level of confidence to hold here.

The reason these figures are blunt is that the colony is a moving target. A 2% count in late summer with brood still being capped is a different situation than a 2% count in October with no capped brood — the second is borderline, the first is on the way to disaster. The field reference lays the same figures out by colony phase alongside the counting methods and the seasonal calendar, if you want the short version to keep on your phone.

How do you log this so it is actually useful later?

Three habits that take a logging tool from "I have a notebook" to "I have a record I can act on":

Always log the method. A 1% sticky board number and a 1% alcohol-wash number mean different things. The method is part of the data point.
Always log the brood state. "Heavy capped brood" or "broodless" is the context that makes a count interpretable a month later.
Always log what you did about it. If you caught a 3% wash and decided to defer because the bees were under late-season stress, write that reasoning down. Future-you will not remember.

This is the part where a voice-first inspection tool earns its keep. If you narrate the count, the method, the brood state, and the decision in the same breath, you do not have to remember to come back later and fill in the context. It is in the record because you said it once. (And if you would rather type the inspection on the web portal at the kitchen table, the same fields are there — voice is the fast path at the hive, manual is the comfortable path at the desk.)

What does WhisperBee do with this data?

Three things, in order of importance:

Plot the trend on the hive timeline. A single mite count is barely information; the curve from May to October is what tells you whether your treatment plan worked.
Promote a treatment action item when a count comes in above 3 mites per 100 bees. Note that this is the app's own built-in figure, not a restatement of the Coalition's table above — read the two separately, and treat the published guidance as the one that governs your decision.
Defer unrelated brood-quality alerts for two weeks after a mite treatment starts. Some products temporarily scatter brood; a "spotty brood" concern in that window is downgraded with the message that you have recently treated, instead of pushing you toward an unnecessary requeen decision.

If you want to see the voice-logging workflow at the hive itself, the features page walks through it end-to-end. If you want to know what the AI actually extracts from a varroa-mention and how to correct anything it got wrong, the FAQ covers it.

What about treatment-free?

If you are running a treatment-free operation, varroa tracking matters more, not less. The hypothesis you are testing is "my bees can manage their own mites" — and you cannot test that hypothesis without a count. Tracking lets you cut your losses on a colony that is failing the test before it crashes and pollutes your other yards.

Where to start if you have not been tracking

Pick one yard. Do an alcohol wash on every colony in that yard this week. Log the count, the brood state, and your decision for each. Repeat in three weeks. That is enough to start a trend line and enough to make decisions on. You can always layer in more rigor later — the cost of starting is much smaller than the cost of not starting.

Sources and further reading

Honey Bee Health Coalition — Tools for Varroa Management: A Guide to Effective Varroa Sampling and Control, Ninth Edition, June 11 2026. https://honeybeehealthcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/HBHC-Guide_Varroa-Mgmt_9thEd.pdf — Table 1, the phase-dependent treatment figures quoted above, and the Coalition's own caveat that mite thresholds are an evolving science, often situationally and regionally specific.
Honey Bee Health Coalition — Tools for Varroa Management, Eighth Edition, August 1 2022. https://honeybeehealthcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/HBHC-Guide_Varroa-Mgmt_8thEd-082422.pdf — the superseded figures quoted in the "they changed recently" paragraph, and the three sampling methods.

How to Track Varroa Mite Levels: A Practical Guide for 2026