How the tools are checked

Primary sources only

Every figure on this site traces to a primary source: the Honey Bee Health Coalition's Tools for Varroa Management, 9th edition (June 11, 2026); USDA's Agricultural Research Service; a university extension service — NC State, Mississippi State, Penn State, UMass, Utah State, Alabama, Michigan State, Arizona, Missouri, UF/IFAS, Arkansas, Cornell or UC Davis, depending on the tool; USDA FoodData Central; NIST Handbook 44; NBS Circular C457; USDA's National Agricultural Statistics Service; and, for sticky-board levels, Ontario's OMAFRA, the Ontario Beekeepers' Association, the World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH), the UK's National Bee Unit and Ireland's Federation of Irish Beekeepers' Associations (FIBKA). A research summary — someone else's write-up of what one of these says — is never quoted here; a tool reads the primary document itself.

Varroa thresholds

The varroa calculator's action levels come from HBHC's Table 1, read by colony phase, and that table is the guidance the tool leads with. An older 3-per-100 level that some sources still print appears only as labelled older guidance, never blended into HBHC's own numbers. A sample's mites-per-100 figure is compared against a threshold exactly, with no correction factor for method, season or region applied on top. Nothing here turns a calendar's season or month into an HBHC colony phase, or a colony phase into a month; a calendar's own months and HBHC's phases stay two separate things.

Sticky boards

The sticky-board tool works out a daily mite-drop count and checks it against every published level it has for that count, each one shown with the region and season the level was written for rather than collapsed into one pass-or-fail line. Where the UK National Bee Unit's guidance comes from a chart rather than a printed table, a month's band is read off that chart and kept only where the Irish beekeepers' association FIBKA's own printed table agrees on the same number for that month. The tool prints no percentage of mites and no estimate of a colony's total mite count from a sticky-board drop. One of its sources, the UK's National Bee Unit, publishes a seasonal multiplier for turning a daily drop into an estimated colony count; the tool doesn't apply it, because the NBU's own fact sheet calls the underlying method inaccurate for total mite numbers and unreliable for a colony that's broodless or collapsing, conditions a mite count alone can't confirm or rule out.

Syrup

Sugar syrup amounts are worked out by weight first, in pounds and kilograms, and cups, quarts and gallons of dry sugar or water are derived from USDA FoodData Central's weights per portion together with NIST's definitions of those units. A 2:1 syrup's finished volume in gallons comes from NBS Circular C457's table of sugar solutions, checked against a scan of the circular's 1946 printing; 1:2 syrup and the volume ratios get no gallon figure, because C457 has no row checked against for them.

Prices and yields

Each cost preset's honey price is dated to the month its own source prices at, not to today. Mississippi's own line items, added up, come to $1,070.33 against the $1,070.34 the publication prints as its total — a one-cent gap already in the source's arithmetic, kept as printed rather than corrected here. USDA's National Agricultural Statistics Service prices cover operations of five or more colonies, not a single first-year hive.

Calendars

Each of the nine regional calendars quotes or paraphrases only its own region's saved source. A mite count or an action threshold printed for one region is never carried over to another region's page, and no calendar entry names a treatment product; both point to the varroa calculator instead, or, where a product is named, to the calendar's own source. Missouri's calendar keeps one older mite-population threshold inside the sentence it was originally printed in and flags that entry as an older threshold wherever it appears.

Not modelled

The tools don't choose a treatment or a dose, diagnose a colony, apply a correction factor to a published figure, or reproduce a state's registration or inspection rules. For a state's own rules, the Apiary Inspectors of America directory is linked to instead of guessed at.

Records stay in your browser

Inspection log entries, cost line items and every other record you enter are kept in your browser's own storage, not on a server. The inspection log can export what's been entered as a CSV file; nothing is uploaded anywhere by the tool itself.

Checks

HBHC's guide is checked quarterly, with the next check due December 2026. Prices, calendars and this site's other cited sources are checked yearly. USDA NASS's honey price data is checked again after its next scheduled release. Every quote used anywhere on this site is tested against a saved copy of the page it's quoted from, so a quote that stops matching its source fails a test rather than going unnoticed.