Seems impractical to me, and too fussy. The author claims it's superior to simple drone pupae culling because with drone culling you supposedly have to go into the hive twice, to freeze the drone frame, then put it back. But you don't have to do that- just pull out the drone frame, scrape off the caps of the capped drone brood, and replace the frame. One step, takes about 20 seconds. Voila, done. No need to hook up wires from the frame to a battery and then wait 2-5 minutes to heat it up. No need to actually buy anything. Drone culling by scraping/uncapping is as easy and quick as it gets if you are after the mites in the drone cells and don't want to use chemicals or apply any substances at all.
The article says you could adjust the heat to kill the mites but not harm the drone pupae. I don't buy that. It's one thing to have just enough insecticide on a tick collar to kill the ticks on a dog but not harm the dog. It's another thing altogether to heat the whole dog up enough to kill all the ticks attached to it in 5 minutes but not harm the dog. :shock: I'd think soft moist drone pupae would be much more vulnerable to being zapped with heat than a tough hard shelled mite.
In my opinion, though it's well intentioned, this is sort of like inventing a tiny heat seeking missile to kill a fly in your kitchen, when a simple flyswatter will do the job more reliably, cheaper, and faster.
