Blue
Shop
Towels

For Tracheal Mites in Honey Bees

New rolls set into mixture

Completely saturated

A roll stacked for draining.

Finished rolls in bags on left.

We made up blue shop towels this morning, and here are some useful numbers.

• We used 10 kg (10,000 g or 22 lbs) of  Crisco and 10 kg (10,000 g or 22 lbs) of menthol crystals in a batch. Menthol comes in a 25 kg cardboard drum, Crisco comes in a 20 kg box.

• Everything fits into one standard washtub which we heated with a torch. to melt the Crisco (vegetable shortening). To avoid evaporating the menthol, we used little or no additional heat after melting the grease.

• When we then added the menthol, we stirred until it was dissolved.

• We made 29 one third sized rolls of treatment.  Each roll has 55 sheets. 

• That means that we made 29 x 55 = 1,595 sheets using 10,000 grams of menthol

• That calculates out to be 10,000 / 1,595 = 6.26 grams of menthol per treatment.

That is a lot less than some people think necessary, but it has worked well for us.

Here are some more numbers:

• Each treatment roll is 1/3 of a towel roll.

• Each 1/3 roll weighed 3.5 oz (99g) before soaking

• Each 1/3 roll weighed 1 pound, 13 ounces (823g) after soaking.

Other blue shop towel pages (1)  (2)  (3)

Disclaimer: This method seems to work for us, but we can't guarantee that it works for anyone else.