Honesty is great! I hate doing the counts too - I worry about hurting bees. So there are some “work-arounds”.
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This is the most expensive, but if you already have the equipment, you can do an “accelerated mite drop”
Oxalic Acid Treatments discussion - #28 by Dawn_SD -
If you don’t have that equipment, then you can build this one fairly cheaply, which makes scooping up the bees a lot easier:
https://www.beelab.umn.edu/sites/beelab.umn.edu/files/cfans_asset_317462.pdf