# ipm as a path to treatment free



## squarepeg (Jul 9, 2010)

as we have seen from several recent posts, one of the bigger challenges for those desiring to be treatment free is that tf stock is not always available for purchase. 

we also see the many reports of limited success when beekeepers, beginners in particular, attempt to withdraw treatments cold turkey from colonies that come with a history of being treated.

the original intent of the 'treatment-free beekeeping' subforum is outlined in the forum description on the page listing all of the forums, and reads:

"Discussing and formulating honeybee management methods that cooperate as much as possible with natural bee biology without resorting to the use of chemicals and drugs."

when the 'unique forum rules' for the tf subforum were drafted and adopted, the definition of treatment was presented more specifically as:

"Treatment: A substance introduced by the beekeeper into the hive with the intent of killing, repelling, or inhibiting a pest or disease afflicting the bees."

so the bar appeared to be raised from 'chemicals and drugs' to any 'substance introduced by the beekeeper' to include powdered sugar and honey bee healthy as examples.

also drafted into the unique forum rules was the important caveat that discussing the use of treatments was acceptable in the context of being:

"employed as part of a plan in becoming treatment free."

...which brings me back to my purpose for starting this thread. it's about having a discussion about how folks transition from readily available nonresistant stock to bees that are much less or not at all dependent on interventions. it gets to the intent of formulating methods as laid out in the original description of the subforum.

just like we have various definitions of 'treatment' that are out there, i find that ipm is described in different ways depending where you look. the basic idea is that effective monitoring is used and interventions are approached in such a way as to employ the least invasive methods necessary to get the job done, with the ultimate goal of arriving at a management scheme where very little or no intervention is necessary.

it is my hope that folks like jrg13, astrobee, ruthiesbees, and others will find it within their comfort zone to share with us here the approaches they have been using as a means to this end, and that those who are looking for a path from starting with treated bees to becoming treatment free will be helped by the discussion.


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## Barry (Dec 28, 1999)

This is, and always has been a very important issue with me. It came out of my own personal experiences moving from treatment to treatment free beekeeping. Having started under the instruction of the Lusby's, I followed the 'no exception' route and it took a huge toll on my bees. When discussion was not allowed about how to move away from all treatments by still using some type of treatment, that is when I parted ways and laid down the direction of this forum. That is why there is an 'organic' group that Dee now heads up, and this one here that doesn't believe in the hard line, cold turkey approach. The end goal is much the same, but the path to reach it is different.


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## Fusion_power (Jan 14, 2005)

> The end goal is much the same, but the path to reach it is different.


 The painful lessons from watching bees die can be skipped with an IPM approach. The hard work of selecting for mite resistance still has to be done.

I was fortunate to be able to go more or less cold turkey by having access to the right genetics. IMO, it is much easier to get to treatment free by incorporating queens from existing TF beekeepers than to develop TF stock. I'm going to try to make more queens available this year so we can give a few more beekeepers a running start.

I would really appreciate if Barry would tell his TF story here so others can read how things went for him. Kim Flottum has shared quite a bit of his philosophy for beekeeping in the TF zone. Would you do the same?


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## enjambres (Jun 30, 2013)

The term IPM (or Integrated Pest Management) is misunderstood/misused on BeeSource. On this site it has evolved away from its commonly-understood usage in agriculture where it means adding non-pesticide management practices to conventional management techniques as a means of reducing, but not exclusively avoiding the use of various agricultural "chemicals".

The key is the word "integrated", meaning both approaches are to be combined and used simultaneously with the goal being a reduction in pesticide use, and in some cases a synergy, which leads to healthier and more productive crops. But it does not imply a replacement of one approach by the other, as I often see it used here.

And indeed in the larger world of general agriculture, IPM techniques can actually involve the use of more, and different, agricultural chemicals to reduce the need for chemical _pest management_. An example would be using glyphosate (Round-Up) to burn down hedgerow weeds in order to reduce alternate hosts for some crop-damaging insects, thereby reducing the need to spray the crops themselves to prevent damage.

Perhaps it would be less confusing to use another categorical name for practices such as SBB, sugar dusting, drone trapping, etc, when they are intended to replace the use of miticides. I don't think IPM is quite the word you want since in this forum you aren't integrating these techniques to merely lower the need for miticides, but to eliminate their use entirely. 

Enj.


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## TNValleyBeeK (Oct 3, 2012)

Please forgive my ignorance. What exactly are treatment free bees? If the genetics are there to breed treatment free bees then why can't it be propagated to fix the entire industry. Are you guys keeping your bees alive year in year out, or are you simply splitting enough to replace your dead loss? I know a few talk about it, and some claim to have special genetics, and profit from it, but it just seems like a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow.


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## squarepeg (Jul 9, 2010)

hi tvb. treatment free can mean different things to different people but i believe what most folks are talking about here is not using any interventions for mite control. i can only speak for myself, but i've been chronicling my experience for the past couple of years in this thread:

http://www.beesource.com/forums/showthread.php?306377-squarepeg-2015-2016-treatment-free-experience

the short answers to your questions are:

yes my colonies stay alive year after year; no it is not necessary to split all of the hives to replace losses; the majority of my hives are not split but instead managed for swarm prevention and honey production; i don't know if the reason for success is special genetics, management, environmental, or some combination; i sell a few nucs and queen cells but i wouldn't call it profitable; pots of gold at the end of rainbows don't exist but my experience is real.

it's not entirely understood why bees like these fail when they are transplanted into other areas, but the thinking is that it because bees are very good at hybridizing with whatever local population they are put into, and within a generation or two the traits of the bees pretty much become the same as all the other bees in the neighborhood.

if you are interested i have put my 2015 and 2016 production tallies in post #839 on page 21 of the thread linked above.


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## R_V (Aug 20, 2016)

Do you two north Alabama guys share stock with each other?


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## TNValleyBeeK (Oct 3, 2012)

Sounds reasonable, thank you very much. I'll dig into your thread.


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## squarepeg (Jul 9, 2010)

R_V said:


> Do you two north Alabama guys share stock with each other?


if you are talking about dar and i then yes, i managed to acquire a colony from him last year and grafted queens from it. i think i've got 3 or 4 colonies now of his line. i'm planning to make more of those this year.



TNValleyBeeK said:


> Sounds reasonable, thank you very much. I'll dig into your thread.


you are welcome tvb, i appreciate your interest.


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## msl (Sep 6, 2016)

TNValleyBeeK said:


> If the genetics are there to breed treatment free bees then why can't it be propagated to fix the entire industry


Because the industry has many different needs and there is no right bee for all those needs, and every selected for trait enacts a cost 
As an example with no real numbers or reality 
say you run 1,000 hives, If its costs you $25 a year in labor and cems to treat a "breed" of bee, and the available TF stock makes $45 a year less honey what do you do? You treat and make the extra 20k a year. 

or say instead they do make comparable honey crops and overwinter well on a small thrifty cluster, but do to that, end up not brooding up in time for almonds, you stick with the bees you have and treat.

a bee that lives in a backyard/hobbyist setting with a modest crop with no treatment, yes it's out there, the shear existence of local ferrals prove that beyond a doubt! Much less people like all the people here like SP 

a bee that is economically competitive when kept treatment free in high density feedlot conditions VS treated stock...., maybe, maybe not, you can't do that with most stock, whatever animal your running. 
Randy however is a big believer that TF IS the future for the industry, but read his "The Genetic Consequences of Domestication" http://scientificbeekeeping.com/wha...4-the -genetic-consequences-of-domestication/ to get a feel of the issues.

it looks like the old business aixam... Good, fast, cheap... you can pick 2


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## Riverderwent (May 23, 2013)

squarepeg said:


> ...which brings me back to my purpose for starting this thread. it's about having a discussion about how folks transition from readily available nonresistant stock to bees that are much less or not at all dependent on interventions. it gets to the intent of formulating methods as laid out in the original description of the subforum.


Is anyone here aware of someone who has successfully transitioned to being completely treatment free in that manner? I would be curious about the details of how they did it. I think that it would delay the process. "Half measures availeth nothing." But I also would not want to try to start with 90% losses, work with the survivors, and gradually increase survival rates. 

I'm thinking that good genetics in the managed bees are "necessary", but they are not "sufficient", as logicians might say. Effective methods (in many different respects) that are in sync with local flows are likewise necessary, but not sufficient without good starting genetics in the managed bees and at least the potential for good genetics in the local breeding population. When I read about a beekeeper in a particular location that wants to be treatment free, I sometimes kind of play a game with myself, look a google satellite map of the general area and think how would I try to successfully be treatment free in that area. In a couple of areas, from the way conditions are described, I think I would try to raise turnips and chickens instead.


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## Juhani Lunden (Oct 3, 2013)

My original plan to get treatment free was to diminish treatments little by little and eventually became treatment free. But did that with the help of Primorski(=Russian) genetics and also other bees claimed to be more resistant. Starting with common normal bees would have been much more painful. 

Never considered IPM just because, like enjambres said, it means the use of all methods, the use of chemicals is left out only when it is possible, but it is not a route to chemical free. 

I wanted to be chemical free and did it my way (love Sinatra). 



But , from now on,I use the letters "IPM" to mean somekind of a path to TF bekeeping. In my original plans, back in 2001, I reconed that in a situation where some colonies are treated and some not, the actual steps taken forward in breeding work would be very short. There might be no progress at all. These were my thoughts and that is why I took the "diminishing treatments route". The big idea was to give bees time to adjust and evaluate in a more sure way the true value of different stocks.

Lets consider a situation where some colonies in a beeyard are treated and some not, and the beekeeper is starting with normal bees (silly not to use VSH bees say from Adam Finkelstein).

- The eventually treated hives may have actually been better genetically than the not-treated, because in the starting point situation they just had more mites than the untreated. For the average beekeeper it is a challenging task to evaluate mite infestation level correctly. 

- Now the treated bees get new queens from TF hives, which by the way is a difficult task for the average beekeeper too, and these treated hives, with new queens from TF hives, seem to be very good in the next two three years. The beekeeper is sure that the secret was his breeding work(selection) and takes grafts from them to make the next generation. The truth is that they are better because they got treated. Treatments mess up the evaluation process and eventually the beekeeper takes one step forward and two back.

- In the years coming the beekeeper has a beeyard where there are hives treated one year ago, hives treated two years ago and maybe even hives treated three years ago. How do you evaluate their genetic value?

- The new queens are mated with all the normal treated hives drones in the area and varroa resistance returns to the average without mating controls, if some progress had been made

In stead of IPM method I have propagated the Josef Koller idea (Breeding Program ROOTs) of filling the world little by little with TF beeyards, starting in remote places and good genetics.


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## Fusion_power (Jan 14, 2005)

> In stead of IPM method I have propagated the Josef Koller idea (Breeding Program ROOTs) of filling the world little by little with TF beeyards


 This is pretty close to what I did. I found a queen in a swarm caught in 2004 that maintained a healthy colony with no treatments. I purchased 10 goldline queens from Purvis and used them to produce drones to mate with queens raised from my swarm queen. The result was the line of bees I have today. I deliberately pushed my bees in 2006 and 2008 to swarm heavily with the result that this area is saturated with feral colonies that have never been treated and don't need to be treated. The result is that beekeepers who bring treated stock into the area gradually shift to resistant genetics because that is what the background population carries.


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## 1102009 (Jul 31, 2015)

Still, to me there is one essential question left:
if most small beekeepers are not isolated and would not be able to requeen every one or two years with resistant purchased queens because of the high costs, and would not have ferals or resistant drones around to keep better genetics,
what´s to do then? The Koller idea is what is propagated on ResistantBees forum and tried by many, but who in crowded conditions is isolated enough?



> - Now the treated bees get new queens from TF hives, which by the way is a difficult task for the average beekeeper too, and these treated hives, with new queens from TF hives, seem to be very good in the next two three years. The beekeeper is sure that the secret was his breeding work(selection) and takes grafts from them to make the next generation. The truth is that they are better because they got treated. Treatments mess up the evaluation process and eventually the beekeeper takes one step forward and two back.


I´m not able to understand this. I graft or breed from established tf hives which are survivors, so I have an impression about the queen`s abilities.
The problem I see is: a purchased queen which is introduced into your treated , but now tf hive and you don´t know how "resistant" this queen is.
But in one or two seasons you will know. So until then it is just luck.

It is my hope that dar´s methods will work here sometimes if multiplying and selecting leads to enough stock as to distribute some genetics among other beekeepers hives.
No setting free of swarms ( not possible in my location, I think) but giving away to co-workers.


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## Barry (Dec 28, 1999)

enjambres said:


> I don't think IPM is quite the word you want since in this forum you aren't integrating these techniques to merely lower the need for miticides, but to eliminate their use entirely.


TPM - Temporary Pest Management


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## Barry (Dec 28, 1999)

Fusion_power said:


> I would really appreciate if Barry would tell his TF story here so others can read how things went for him. Kim Flottum has shared quite a bit of his philosophy for beekeeping in the TF zone. Would you do the same?


Oh, I'm sure it's all here. I'd have to do a little searching.


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## Juhani Lunden (Oct 3, 2013)

SiWolKe said:


> I´m not able to understand this. I graft or breed from established tf hives which are survivors, so I have an impression about the queen`s abilities.



Yes, you breed from your established tf hives, which are survivors (hopefully true survivors, not by chance) and give daughters of these queens to the hives which you have treated with your foolish (machine, not you) ultrasonic device, or by any other means as we are now talking in this thread about IPM management. So the queens get into a treated hive in IPM management. THESE hives, with new queens are propably preddy **** good the next two three years, and you admire them and write 210 beesource messages about how wonderfull they are. BUT they are good just because of the treatment. 

Did I explain it well enough?

(From forum rules: Treatment: A substance introduced by the beekeeper into the hive with the intent of killing, *repelling*, or inhibiting a pest or disease afflicting the bees.)


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## lharder (Mar 21, 2015)

I suspect a hard bond is the shortest path to filtering genetics and eventually arriving at sustainable local TF stock. I'm going into my 3rd winter and it looks like I will have quite a few more bees this vs last year in spite of losses unacceptable to others. At the same time I understand that numbers are on my side, and that my success depends on increasing my genetic foot print in the absence of proven resistant feral stock. That means finding new yards to put bees. For those that want a limited number of hives, it means forming cooperative arrangements with other local TF keepers. One can go with some isolated breeding situations or A.I. to supplement the approach. The danger is that there are probably other good traits out there that one's bees could use even if it means more losses short term. Of course the advantage of hard bond, is that nature does the selection work for you and one can be more or less ignorant of the fine details, so long as enough bees survive year to year. But if one wishes, and is curious, one can survey bees and see what solutions they are coming up with. Very informative as nature explores all solution space and maybe provides opportunity to introduce new traits that are missing from local populations that would give additional boosts in terms of survival and production. 

The need for doing some treatment depends on whether you have enough bees to work with in the spring. I recently heard a report of a TF keeper losing a very large percentage of his hives, to the point he has nothing to work with in the spring. This and other reports indicates in some area, some sort of treatment regime is probably needed in the short term or maybe even the long term in areas of large scale interregional bee movement, where the adaptive environment, specifically viral, is too chaotic for local adaptation to get dialed in. It also means detailed use of proxies for resistance. More expertise is needed, maybe some A.I is needed, more judgement is needed. Eventually TF yards are needed to properly assess.


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## 1102009 (Jul 31, 2015)

Juhani Lunden said:


> Did I explain it well enough?


No, it´s only your mood which shows.

You queen breeders sell queens to people like humble me who write 210 messages about being enthusiastic, so we will have better stock in future.
So into which hives should we introduce them since the "resistant" ones are not bred already?

It´s the same plan I have with my two bee yards. :s

First step: multiply.
Second: look for better queens or breed them.
Third: change all hives to be better performers


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## Richard Cryberg (May 24, 2013)

SiWolKe said:


> Second: look for better queens or breed them.


Your second step is the step that ultimately allows you to either have hives that prosper and produce decent yields of honey or have so many hives die you are constantly splitting just to keep the count constant and produce a dribble or less of honey. So, how about a whole lot of detail on how that second step is accomplished? What kind of written records must you have to make sensible choices in a breeding program for instance? How are you going to recognize a better queen when you see her? What is your breeding target? For example low mites or low virus titers. How are you going to measure each colony against those breeding targets?


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## tpope (Mar 1, 2015)

Richard Cryberg said:


> Your second step is the step that ultimately allows you to either have hives that prosper and produce decent yields of honey or have so many hives die you are constantly splitting just to keep the count constant and produce a dribble or less of honey. So, how about a whole lot of detail on how that second step is accomplished? What kind of written records must you have to make sensible choices in a breeding program for instance? How are you going to recognize a better queen when you see her? What is your breeding target? For example low mites or low virus titers. How are you going to measure each colony against those breeding targets?


Yes! This is where I too could use some education.


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## squarepeg (Jul 9, 2010)

(dr.) richard cryberg is a seasoned and extremely knowledgeable beekeeper who has successfully kept bees off treatments up in ohio but found them to be too swarmy and unproductive for his taste so he went back to conventional methods.

this thread was started so that contributors like dr. cryberg would feel more comfortable sharing their experiences and expertise here in this subforum. welcome to the conversation dick!


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## Juhani Lunden (Oct 3, 2013)

Richard Cryberg said:


> What kind of written records must you have to make sensible choices in a breeding program for instance? How are you going to recognize a better queen when you see her? What is your breeding target? For example low mites or low virus titers. How are you going to measure each colony against those breeding targets?


Back in 2000, when I was in that point of making the decision of weather getting into IPM route or BOND method route, IPM method was considered to be the best method among the majority of beekeepers and scientists. The most simple solution to make breeding evaluation was to measure how fast varroa population is growing. To do that at least 2-3 measurements of infestation level were needed. One in spring, one in summer and one in autumn for instance. Colony strength coud be monitored at the same time. 

I had many concerns:
- I had not enough time to do all the measurements for 150 hives
- It is especially tricky and time consuming to measure mites in brood cells, specially in spring the point of major brood rearing starting was varying, and varroa brood cycles with that, so for exact varroa growth rate it is not enough just to monitor adult bees or debris on hive bottom 
- even if I had the measurements to count varroa growth rate, were they accurate enough to rule out 92% of my hives (8% for grafting in average)
- I was not sure that the varroa population growth would be constant say from 0-300 mites, 300-1000 mites and 1000-5000 mites (just examples), there maybe some other things starting to take place when mites became more numerous. Could the bees strategy change with growing mite numbers? 
- In 70% of my hives the queen was changed in the end July, would the measurements made in May or June apply to this new queen too? How many mites were killed in winter? How can I estimate that? Would I have to make more measurements in spring and autumn, the most busy seasons for a farmer.

In the end I found IPM method too labourous and uncertain for my taste.


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## lharder (Mar 21, 2015)

Juhani Lunden said:


> Back in 2000, when I was in that point of making the decision of weather getting into IPM route or BOND method route, IPM method was considered to be the best method among the majority of beekeepers and scientists. The most simple solution to make breeding evaluation was to measure how fast varroa population is growing. To do that at least 2-3 measurements of infestation level were needed. One in spring, one in summer and one in autumn for instance. Colony strength coud be monitored at the same time.
> 
> I had many concerns:
> - I had not enough time to do all the measurements for 150 hives
> ...


When you read R Oliver's site, he spends a lot of time making these tasks more efficient. In some ways I am in the same boat as you. I am not a ocd type note taker and data gatherer. I'm more interested in survival and honey production as black box measures. However, I am interested in what traits are in my population and would even like to fine tune this to the point of protein expression at some point. With this knowledge I could augment the existing resistance mechanisms, with new ones by bringing in queens that have them. But I don't have to sample every hive. Just a representative sample. If I'm do it right, I could gather samples, preserve them for analysis later in the winter when not so busy. But the point is not IPM, but understanding.


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## 1102009 (Jul 31, 2015)

Richard Cryberg said:


> Your second step is the step that ultimately allows you to either have hives that prosper and produce decent yields of honey or have so many hives die you are constantly splitting just to keep the count constant and produce a dribble or less of honey. So, how about a whole lot of detail on how that second step is accomplished? What kind of written records must you have to make sensible choices in a breeding program for instance? How are you going to recognize a better queen when you see her? What is your breeding target? For example low mites or low virus titers. How are you going to measure each colony against those breeding targets?


With respect to you experience beekeepers:

I keep records since 2014 and describe them in my thread.
http://www.beesource.com/forums/sho...nicle-of-a-beekeeper-from-South-Germany/page5

Since my experience is still limited my records help me mostly to realize my mistakes but still, they give an impression what my bees do.
Comparing this to mite monitoring I hope I will see what I need to be successful in the end.
Success to me means to have not 100% loss.

I started 2015 with more "resistant" hives, established, which had queens not treated for years, one of them a survivor queen, all doing VSH, all with entrance defense except one.
This I did because people told me it would not work with local treated mutts.

Everybody has his own goals, mine are mostly survival and good overwintering, harvesting is not important to me just now.
So this traits will be my breeding traits.
Linked with some managements with splitting which I hope keep mites at bay like in nature mites are kept at bay my path will develop by and by.


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## beepro (Dec 31, 2012)

Sik, seeing those backyard trees and shrubs, you can put some swarm trap there hoping to induce
some swarm into the wild population. Don't collect anything from those swarm trap hives. Use them
as a source of local survival drones. These will be the ones that mixed with your grafted queens at queen
rearing time. At my constant mite removal mgmt post all hives are still alive building up for the early Spring time.
Without a tf option those are probably be dead by now pretty much like my 3rd year hive crashed experience. Now I
know this method works. I can either continue to expand using this method or continue to monitor for the hives that
show the most resistant. http://www.beesource.com/forums/showthread.php?332871-Constant-mite-removal-management

"What kind of written records must you have to make sensible choices in a breeding program for instance? How are you going to recognize a better queen when you see her? What is your breeding target? For example low mites or low virus titers. How are you going to measure each colony against those breeding targets?"

You have to start small and grow from your resistant selected hives each season.
I don't keep written records because when the hives grow to 100 or more it is too much work to keep track of everything. I do, however, keep track of the individual queen from which queen mother they come from with a digital picture. So the record for now is to contine to select for the resistant traits from hives that show the most mite fighting ability to graft. Using my mite bee bomb method every queen already has a chance to deal with the mites from the time she emerged, mated and laying leading to the next early Spring time build up. Also, the mites and virus load goes hand in hand. When there are heavy infestation then you will see many DWVs and other (brood) diseases. I try to keep the mites in check so that less diseases will be develop. The best way to guage your breeding target is to have other hives for a comparison. For example, when the sister hive is building up earlier, faster and stronger in population than the other hives, this might be a good sign of better resistant and better genetic traits that I'm going to select and graft from. Using a peer to peer evaluation as a group is a good strategy to guage the individual queen for whatever traits or targets you are looking for.


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## Richard Cryberg (May 24, 2013)

If you have two or three hives memory can be ok instead of written records. You also are not going to do any breeding that leads to meaningful advancement in queen performance. To have any real chance of advancement in queen performance you probably need something like 20 hives minimum. The key to advancement is selection. You want to breed from no more than the best 10%. And you need enough hives to avoid inbreeding problems. When you have 20 hives your memory is near worthless, particularly back a couple of generations.

There is an age old rule in breeding. No mater the species the rule is you get what you select for. There is a second age old rule. That rule is the more young you raise the luckier you get. Both rules fall automatically out of how genetics works. Now, say you have 20 colonies and raise 40 queens but only want 20. That is a wonderful problem. You have an extra 20 queens to select from and get rid of the rest any way you wish. But, obviously you can not remember that much detail. So, let me make a record keeping suggestion.

There are any number of ways to keep records. Part of keeping records is making sure you know about the queen in every box. To know it is the same queen you need to either clip a wing or color mark her. If you do not do this and she is superseded you may well not realize it. You also need to write stuff. I put a pint zip lock baggy on the inner cover of every hive and every nuc. That baggy has paper in it. My tool box that goes to the yard whenever I am going to open a hive has sharpies in it as well as extra bags with paper in them. I can keep any records that I want on that paper and it is protected from the elements and from the bees. If I move a queen say from a nuc to a production hive the baggy goes with her. The absolute minimum on that paper is who that queens mother was and what date she started to lay approximately. I also note the queens color. Black versus tan. I keep notes on anything unusual I happen to note about that queen. For example one that seems to build up fast in the nuc considering the amount of support staff she has. I can keep mite counts and the date of the count. I keep track of every super of honey harvested to the nearest half super. I will note a queen that was slow to lay. She is usually called dead fairly fast unless the weather was awful. If I ever treat for EFB that is on the notes. Last year I had a queen who when she started to lay had really tattered wings like you see sometimes on a real old worn out worked. That is on the records. If the hive seems well above average at the rate they draw comb that is on the records. If a hive swarms that goes on the records and when the new queen is laying I find her and kill her and requeen by doing a paper combine with a whole nuc. Once a year I can go around and review those hive notes or if needed transcribe some so I can have thinking time and decide which to breed from. When a the notes come to a dead end on a queen I can keep them if I have bred from her, other wise I scrap them. For example that hive that swarmed and I found and killed the daughter queen I scrap the notes and the hive gets the notes from the nuc I requeened with unless I had made a mistake and bred from the queen that swarmed. If I had bred from her I need to find the daughters and consider killing them.

That swarming example is meaningful. I hate bees that swarm. Swarming is highly genetic. I select against swarming very strongly. I do not have much problem with swarming as a result. Remember breeding rule one? You get what you breed from. If you breed from queens that swarm you get bees that swarm. Probably the single worst mistake you can make is to raise queens from swarm cells. Doing that as a main way to raise queens pretty much assures you that in ten years you will not be able to keep your bees out of the trees.

There are lots and lots of ways to keep records. You figure out what works for you. If you are not keeping records you are not selectively breeding. You are randomly threshing about aimlessly.

Breeding is always a matter of trade offs. You need to decide what your primary goal is and focus real hard on that primary goal. But, you also have secondary goals you need to weigh when deciding which queen to breed from. Say I have a three year old queen that swarms. Last year she was the best honey producer I had. Her hive has always maintained a mite count below my overall average. So, I already this year raised five or ten young queens from her. Would I kill them because she swarmed? No I would not. But, I would pay particular attention to them and if I saw any of them swarm that line would be dead regardless of how much honey they made or how low their mite counts were.

You need to think hard about what particular traits you are going to select for and how you are going to measure progress. If you are selecting for mite tolerance you better have mite counts two or three times over the summer on all your hives so you can make comparisons or you are selecting blindly. Keeping bees alive really is pretty easy. Making progress towards a better bee is bloody hard work. Personally, I would love to select for virus tolerance. But, I have no clue how to measure that at a price I am willing to pay.


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## Fusion_power (Jan 14, 2005)

I'll build on RC's post by adding some links to documents about bee breeding. Selecting for a single trait is relatively easy and can be done with no records. Honey production is NOT a single trait. It is the synthesis of just about everything the colony does. It is possible to select for mite resistance as a single trait. It is possible to select for non-swarming as a single trait. This type selection does not really achieve much, but in some circumstances it is critical to future breeding work. An example would be breeding bees for 10 generations selecting for mite resistance, then starting a multi-trait selection program with bees that are all stable for mite resistance.

Self performance evaluation is the lowest level of bee breeding. Evaluate each queen and her colony, then select the queens that have the traits desired to raise from. This is a valid way to improve performance, but it is slow and runs into problems with inbreeding.

Mass selection is a form of self performance selection where a large number of queens/colonies are evaluated, then all poor performers are eliminated from the breeding population. As an example, 250 colonies might be evaluated for a given trait such as stinging tendency, then the bottom 2/3 eliminated leaving about 85 colonies to breed from. This is the basic method Kefuss used to breed mite resistant bees in France.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00218839.2016.1160709

Crossbreeding followed by various forms of selection was the method used by Brother Adam. The key with crossbreeding is that it must start with significantly different strains of bees that bring different traits to the mix. Crossbreeding involves heterosis to enhance performance. I recommend reading Brother Adam's book Breeding the Honeybee. Brother Adam achieved 500% improvement in honey production using a long term crossbreeding strategy.

Line breeding is a method of selecting within a breeding line with little or no external stock brought into the program. The Achilles heel of line breeding is that inbreeding eventually nullifies most of the improvements made. To maintain a line breeding program for 40 generations would require about 250 colonies in the breeding population.

This article by Rinderer and Harbo is a good beginning point. http://beesource.com/resources/usda/breeding-and-genetics-of-honey-bees/


Recent work in Germany has been based on BLUP pedigree selection. This is a standardized way of ranking queens in terms of performance improvement over time. It involves isolated mating stations, a huge population of queens being evaluated by many beekeepers, and performance metrics that are evaluated by a computer to determine the breeding value of each queen. Each queen in this type program determines the value of related queens. For example, 20 daughters are raised from a breeder queen. The daughters are mated with drones chosen for traits to complement the queens. The daughter queens are then monitored through a year and ranked in the pedigree. The daughters then determine the breeding value of their mother and hierarchically of all related queens going back to grandmother, great grandmother, aunts, great aunts, and their descendants. The Achilles heel of this type program is again inbreeding, but it is a special case different from line breeding. A queen has to be chosen as a drone mother to stock the mating station. Twenty or so daughters are raised from her and mated, then put into colonies at the mating station. This is where the problem comes in. Of the 20 daughters, each has one sex allele from the mother and one from a random drone. This means that the 20 daughter have 10 duplicates of one sex allele from the mother and 10 duplicates of the other sex allele from the mother, and 20 other sex alleles from the various drones the mother mated with. When the 20 daughter queens produce drones, typically about 30% of them have one sex allele, another 30% have the second sex allele, and the remaining 40% share the remaining sex alleles from the drones the mother mated with. Over time, this skews the presence of sex alleles in the breeding population. There are simple methods to reduce the effect such as rating queens for brood viability and up-rating queens with very high ranking. This has the effect of boosting the presence of rare sex alleles. It is not perfect though, over time there will still be problems with inbreeding.

You will have to click on the download button to get to the pdf file. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/241065842_The_Genetic_Architecture_of_Honeybee_Breeding

This one is math heavy covering methods of rating and calculating breeding value. https://gsejournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12711-014-0053-9

This is a low level description of breeding for mite mauling. http://www.beeculture.com/breeding-mite-biting-bees-to-control-varroa/

This is a link to COLOSS, an effort to breed for improved performance of honeybees. http://coloss.org/


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## 1102009 (Jul 31, 2015)

Thanks for the input,
I will study the links carefully.

In my group we will be tf 3 beekeepers with 50-100 hives among us in the next years ( all are tf for 2-3 years now) , we hope to find some more people to join in.
Therefore we do not isolate ourselves from the treatment scene. We don´t see ourselves as an elite which see the light. well we do but don´t tell them 

The problem is that our surrounding beekeepers breed for other traits than those we want to have. Tolerance to disease or mite defense is not attractive to them as long as honey production is the important thing.
Meaning the commercials. Our own hives give enough honey for family needs and some to sell. 

The treatments still work with most commercials and the minds are still closed to new approaches. If they do not work climate is blamed or the mite infestation by others, especially from the urban beekeepers and hobbyists.
This prejudices can be changed when they see we are beekeepers who are considerate. We all have bee club contacts.

For now, having no established bee yards yet and still on our way to learn how to keep at bay the deadly accumulation of mites through managements not using chemicals, we will just multiply the survivors and watch if some good traits show to have more queens from this hives.

The diversity of genetics we believe no problem, all of us have different genetics in our bees from different more resistant strains, and we can exchange stuff .

In our situations tf means high losses at the beginning so all breeding except the ability to survive as tf is in vain.

So, with our humble records we try to find the queens or colonies which make a brood brake in winter and in a drought, which have the best entrance defense ( not against beekeepers, but insects), which have the most propolis and which balance brood amount to the mite situation. VSH and grooming behaviors come next.

To us, this starting can be achieved with the mutts we breed ourselves out of purchased more resistant stock. So far we have some promising hives.

For the moment it is a big disappointment if the promising hives don´t survive winters or pesticides or our own mistakes. 

We don´t want to become so fanatic as to have no joy in beekeeping any more.
So we are happy if some colonies survive even if those are not the best honey or gentleness hives.

The main goal is being tf and staying tf , and we all are more or less followers of MB and Dee, as much as we can in our locations.


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## Hunajavelho (Oct 11, 2015)

SiWolKe said:


> Thanks for the input,
> 
> The problem is that our surrounding beekeepers breed for other traits than those we want to have. Tolerance to disease or mite defense is not attractive to them as long as honey production is the important thing.
> Meaning the commercials.


All serious Buckfast-queen breeders in Germany breed for disease resistance (ex. Hygienic behaviour and Nosema) and keep count of Varroa mites for queen rearing lines. Some even like Josef Koller breed VSH and Varroa resistance. 

Honey yield is always imprtant but in modern beekeeping there are other factors in play, worth breeding for otherwise you end up without honey even in commercial beekeeping.


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## 1102009 (Jul 31, 2015)

Oh, sorry,
I meant the local sideliner commercial mutt breeders we have around.


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## tpope (Mar 1, 2015)

I see that I'll soon have some reading to do. Thanks folks!


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## billabell (Apr 19, 2010)

Thanks to Richard Cryberg and Fusion Power for excellent posts on breeding and record keeping. Very helpful information provided.:thumbsup:


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## AvatarDad (Mar 31, 2016)

So what is a good book or three written about the topics and at about the level of the two excellent posts below (above, if you read your thread upside down)?

I've read 40 or 50 bee books, but I've never seen a book which addresses breeding beyond "make a split and put 4 frames in it" or "look for a larvae which is *really* small". I've never seen the phrase "hard bond" in a book (which makes me think I haven't found the right book yet).

Mike


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## squarepeg (Jul 9, 2010)

we've had some good discussion so far regarding how folks might approach making the transition from bee requiring treatments toward bees able to do well off treatments.

ruthiebees made an excellent post in another thread that i want to place a snip of here:



ruthiesbees said:


> All my colonies are on screened bottom boards with a solid IPM board underneath, that I keep installed as long as the heat of the summer will allow. Each IPM board is covered with diatomaceous earth, and refreshed as often as weekly if necessary. The bees run the small hives beetles down there and stuff the larvae of SHB and wax moths down there. any mites that fall off are also trapped in the dust and don't return to reinfest the bee colony. Very important that the bees don't roll around in the dust.
> 
> Each colony is also treated monthly with powdered sugar on each comb. Not the brush-it-between-the-frames stuff that Randy Oliver talks about and then so easily dismisses as something that doesn’t work. Each comb is turned on its head and liberally coated taking care not to get it in the cells with developing larvae. Special care is also taken with the comb the queen is on so she does not lose her footing and fall outside the hive. But she gets dusted right along with the rest of them. After an hour, I remove the solid IPM board that had DE dust on it, and is now covered in powdered sugar and any mites, and discard the dust in the trash can so I don’t draw ants. The DE is reapplied and the board slid back into place.
> 
> ...


(click on the blue box with arrows in the quote to see ruthie's entire post)


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## squarepeg (Jul 9, 2010)

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0140337

this study looks at the drifting of bees into neighboring hives. what it finds is that the amount of drift correlates significantly with both placement of the hives and level of varroa infestation.

the authors found that bees are more likely to drift into wrong hives when the hives are located very near each other. this is similar to tom seeley's reports with respect to drift.

the new information in this study is that colonies having higher mite infestations are more 'accepting' of drifters when compared to hives have lower mite infestations. the thinking is that being weakened by varroa results in a loss of defense against intruders, and this provides another mechanism whereby mites can be transferred from one colony to another, and this is happening even prior to robbing.

in keeping with ipm methods, the spread of mites via drifting might be offset to some degree by arranging hives in such a way as to give the bees different visual cues for orientation, i.e. avoid having identical looking hives lined up next to each other, use different colors, have varied markings on the front of the hives, ect.

having said all that, in my yards all of the hives look the same and are lined up next to each other. this technique is presented as a possible aid for those trying to transition their stock toward tf.


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

Re drifting. Never appreciated just how much it happens till one day a car load of hobby beekeepers arrived at my house and said they wanted to learn how to mark a queen. Didn't have any queens I wanted them to practise on but went and grabbed about 30 bees off the landing board of a hive and took them to the shed to be practised on. 

The ones that didn't get speared or drowned in paint were released. Couple weeks later I worked the hives and was surprised to find bright white marked bees in every hive.


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## squarepeg (Jul 9, 2010)

Oldtimer said:


> The ones that didn't get speared or drowned in paint were released. Couple weeks later I worked the hives and was surprised to find bright white marked bees in every hive.




we've talked about how a decreased propensity for robbing would be a desirable trait with respect to mite resistance. it looks like being more discriminating about allowing drifters in, if that is even a trait, would also come in handy.

conventional wisdom has it that any forager laden with bounty will generally be allowed into the hive even if it's the wrong hive. i've observed on many occasions a forager returning with pollen/nectar getting turned away at the entrance and then moving over to the next hive where it was allowed in.


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

I have a theory of my own about that. Some bees such as Italians are renowned for robbing. Others such as Carniolans if pure, less so. They are also less inclined to drift. Always wondered why that would be, as it seems robbing would be an advantage to any hive that could do it, so why would some bees not?
My theory is it's about disease. Nobody knows where AFB actually came from. But wherever it was, robbing would have exposed the robber hive to possibly contracting the disease, non robbers would have been safe, giving them an evolutionary advantage. So I'm thinking Italy probably was AFB free, as those bees are happy to rob.


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## squarepeg (Jul 9, 2010)

indeed ot, that theory makes very good sense. perhaps varroa is the 'afb' equivalent of our current time.

from time to time i'll have a dwindled colony that flat out deserves it but doesn't get robbed. i keep small nucs in the same yard as big production hives, again no problem.

even last fall when the extreme drought was causing dearth conditions like we may have never seen before, the only robbing i had was with a couple of queenless hives that had dwindled to less than a handful of bees.

i've not kept any bees other than these so i've got nothing for comparison, but after reading the various accounts by others on the forum i'm led to believe that my bees have a very low propensity for robbing, and perhaps that is part of why they are doing well off treatments.


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

squarepeg said:


> i'm led to believe that my bees have a very low propensity for robbing


Sounds like that is the case, if they were robbers you would certainly know it.

But in terms of making splits my default is to always assume there will be extreme robbing pressure, doesn't involve much extra work once there is a system in place that is always used and controls robbing. Reading various Beesource threads, seems to me robbing is the biggest factor in why peoples new splits don't make it.


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## squarepeg (Jul 9, 2010)

a couple of snippets about moving one's stock toward mite resistance from another thread:




Riverderwent said:


> This article has an interesting proposal of a soft Bond or blended method of selection.
> 
> https://www.researchgate.net/public..._of_varroa_tolerance_on_Marmara_Island_Turkey.
> 
> The article suggests treating colonies with relatively high mite levels and requeening them with queens from untreated colonies with low mite levels.





Juhani Lunden said:


> To make the right decisions which colony is the one to be treated (bad genetics) and those to be left without treatments(good genetics) is hard.
> 
> I think varroa reproduction rate would be a better assay to select between hives than infestation rate itself.


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## squarepeg (Jul 9, 2010)

ruthiesbees said:


> Took me a bit to find the topic, I'm #53 if this link isn't working right. I'll also copy and paste my response here. http://www.beesource.com/forums/showthread.php?333480-Treatment-free-Bees&p=1507956#post1507956
> 
> I had been asked to share my track toward "treatment free". I will tell you all up front that I don't ever expect to fall into the Solomon Parker's category for truly Treatment Free, but I have no intention of ever putting a miticide or organic acid on my bees.
> 
> ...


many thanks ruthie!

hopefully some of the folks who are unable to purchase treatment free bees can remain chemical free by utilizing some or all of your methods.

it appears to me that none of those methods should disrupt the normal microbial flora within the hive ecosystem, is that how you see it ruthie?


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## ruthiesbees (Aug 27, 2013)

squarepeg said:


> many thanks ruthie!
> 
> hopefully some of the folks who are unable to purchase treatment free bees can remain chemical free by utilizing some or all of your methods.
> 
> it appears to me that none of those methods should disrupt the normal microbial flora within the hive ecosystem, is that how you see it ruthie?


Nothing listed in the above page should disrupt the microbial flora, although some tell me I get into my hives too frequently. I also use a few drops of anise oil in my spray bottle of plain water, rather than a smoker for inspections. And that could be disruptive to the flora if someone gets carried away with it.


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## squarepeg (Jul 9, 2010)

ruthiesbees said:


> Nothing listed in the above page should disrupt the microbial flora...


understood ruthie, and at first glance that's how it looked to me. it seems that should satisfy the concerns expressed by some with respect to the potential for unintended consequences with the use of organic acids and other chemical treatments.

i know you've been raising your own bees and i assume many of the others in the group you are helping are using your bees, but do you have examples of folks bringing in packages originating from out of the area who are achieving success similar to yours using these nonchemical methods?


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## ruthiesbees (Aug 27, 2013)

squarepeg said:


> I know you've been raising your own bees and i assume many of the others in the group you are helping are using your bees, but do you have examples of folks bringing in packages originating from out of the area who are achieving success similar to yours using these nonchemical methods?


I've brought in 2 packages over the years and used the same methods on them. Both packages, 2 separate years, were from Oliverez bees in CA that shipped to Mann Lake. One immediately superceded the queen and mated with local drones. The other queen stuck around for a year or better, but since I always pull the mated queen over to a nuc for the summer brood break, they tend to get sold to other beekeepers so I can't track them for too long. 

I'm getting 10 packages in just a couple of weeks that have mated queens out of GA (gasp!), and I hope to put a ripe queen cell in the nuc with the still caged queen and see if they will accept the virgin as a supercedure. I'm not sure yet whether I will keep 5 of those original queens in my yard and let them run through fall to test the mite load. It's tempting do that as an experiment, but I can only have so many in my yard at one time or the husband isn't too happy with me. (that's why I sell so many of my nucs).


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## squarepeg (Jul 9, 2010)

i can relate to that. among the folks that you are involved with there ruthie, are any of them utilizing these methods using langstroth hives?


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## ruthiesbees (Aug 27, 2013)

squarepeg said:


> i can relate to that. among the folks that you are involved with there ruthie, are any of them utilizing these methods using langstroth hives?


Not with all the details. Many around here use the powdered sugar, but not monthly. Don't know how frequently they do the brood break or requeening. The DE on a bottom board seems to be unique to me, although I try and talk about it a lot on Beesource. Our woodenware supply guy who runs about 15 production hives does use the culling of drone brood for mite control in his hives. He's chemical treatment free in Langstroths and does make a very good crop of honey that he sells. I haven't heard that he raises his own queens yet, he seems to think the blue birds eat his returning virgins. Most of his queens come out of Strachen apiary in CA.


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## squarepeg (Jul 9, 2010)

interesting. again ruthie, thanks for taking the time to share your experience here and providing some nonchemical options for folks to consider.

not that it matters to me, but in the strictest sense of the definition ipm involves monitoring and adjusting methods commensurate to the results of the monitoring as opposed to applying the same methods across the board to all colonies.

but we aren't here satisfy definitions, we're here to keep bees. it really sounds like you are doing a great job ruthie. 

for someone starting with nonresistant bees utilizing monitoring while implementing these strategies and making adjustments accordingly might be a nonchemical path toward having more mite resistant bees.


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## squarepeg (Jul 9, 2010)

are any of you starting with nonresistant bees and looking to try a nonchemcial ipm approach for mite control considering using some or all of the methods ruthie has provided?


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