# New beekeeper interested in chemical free treatment



## berzee (Mar 27, 2013)

Hello all,
I'm doing some research before my very first package of bees gets here in late April. I'd like to be able to treat them without pesticide-type chemicals, but I need advice and suggestions on how to do that. 
For my purposes, I'd say the definition of "chemical free" would just be "if I can put it in my mouth without getting sick, I'm ok with putting it on my hive." Essential oils are fine, fogging with FGMO is fine, sugar dusting is fine. I just want to know if: 1) Have those of you who use/have used these treatments found them effective? 2) Does anyone have any other suggestions for "chemical free" treatments? 
Thanks!


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## fritz_monroe (May 27, 2010)

I'm very new, so can't answer your questions. But will be watching your thread.

There's a whole board farther down the list dealing with nothing but treatment free beekeeping. Probably find all your answers down there.

Here's a link to that board. http://www.beesource.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?251-Treatment-Free-Beekeeping


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## berzee (Mar 27, 2013)

Thanks for the reply fritz_monroe. I have checked out the treatment free beekeeping forum here, but I'm not so much interested in going treatment free as I am in just not treating with chemicals.


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## David LaFerney (Jan 14, 2009)

All new bee keepers are interested in chemical/natural/treatment free bee keeping. "I would rather just have healthy bees" sounds great - but it's hard to resist the dark side. The bar you are setting doesn't leave many options - powdered sugar dusting, hand picking mites, IPM and bointensive, homeopathy, dianetics, prayer, high tolerance for hive lose - that sort of thing. 

Plan to Make a lot of splits for back up hives - seriously. 

Good luck.

On second thought, for real - You should read everything on both of these sites:
Randy Oliver - Scientific Bee Keeping
Michael Bush - The Practical (treatment free) Bee Keeper

Do that and you will at least be exposed to both the yin and yang of what you are thinking about. You're welcome.


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## Mbeck (Apr 27, 2011)

Dianetics?

At what level do you see manageable mite resistance?


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## Michael Bush (Aug 2, 2002)

My experience is they will be much healthier if you don't treat them. Things like essential oils and organic acids disrupt the flora and fauna of the natural system in the hive.

http://www.bushfarms.com/beesfoursimplesteps.htm

I agree I feel safer eating essential oils than eating cumaphos, but why mess up the balance of the hive?


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## Aerindel (Apr 14, 2012)

Listen to this man^^^^^

Its not really about if the treatment is considered a chemical or not, treatments will always make more resistant parasites and weaker hosts. Its been devastating to our own species, no reason to think it will work better with bees.


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## cg3 (Jan 16, 2011)

Aerindel said:


> Its been devastating to our own species,


I treat ear infections with antibiotics, don't feel devastated.


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## Rusty Hills Farm (Mar 24, 2010)

If you are serious about avoiding chemicals, then start with resistant bees--Carniolans, Minnesota Hygienic, VSH, Pol-Line. Even if you start with a package of Italians, you can requeen that package with a resistant queen to help them on their own to deal with mites and disease. 

JMO


Rusty


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## Rusty Hills Farm (Mar 24, 2010)

Aerindel said:


> ...Its been devastating to our own species, no reason to think it will work better with bees.


If it has been so devastating, then how come we manage to live longer and have a much higher survival rate among our infants and toddlers than they did in previous centuries?

Rusty


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## Nabber86 (Apr 15, 2009)

berzee said:


> "if I can put it in my mouth without getting sick, I'm ok with putting it on my hive." Essential oils are fine, fogging with FGMO is fine, sugar dusting is fine. Thanks!


There are plenty of essential oils that are a skin and eye irritating, caustic, and toxic if not down-right poisonous. 

Just because something is perceived as “natural" doesnt make it safe.


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## Andrey Limonchenko (Mar 29, 2013)

Listen to Organically Managed Beekeeping podcast. Many topics on there address these types of treatments. Also checkout http://www.wolfcreekbees.com/ they have a downloadable pdf of essential oil treatments and http://www.backwardsbeekeepers.com/


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## berzee (Mar 27, 2013)

_cg3_, thanks for the tip. I'll do some research on formic and oxalic acids. 
_Rusty Hills Farms_, thanks for the advice on bee species. The bees I'm getting will be Carniolans. I picked them because I read that they survive winters better then Italians. I didn't know they were resistant to mites and diseases too.


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## Michael Bush (Aug 2, 2002)

The problems with acids are the same as the problems with essential oils. They will kill off virtually all of the microbes and those are necessary for the health of the hive.

http://www.bushfarms.com/beesmorethan.htm
http://www.bushfarms.com/beesfoursimplesteps.htm#notreatments


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## Waterbird17 (Apr 30, 2012)

Look at it this way. as was told to me by the head apiarist in my state.

If your dog gets sick and you take it to the vet and it needs medicine, do you treat it?

If your child gets sick and the doctor says they need medicine, do you treat them?

If you get sick and the doctor says you need medicine, do you take it?

If your bees get sick and need medicine, do you treat them? 

Do you want your bees to live? or struggle and die? How much time, energy, and money do you have to put into your bees?

Just a few things to think about


There's a LOT that goes into it. the best thing is to go around and talk to as many successful bee keepers you can and make your opinion and decisions from what you learn.


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## Rusty Hills Farm (Mar 24, 2010)

berzee said:


> _Rusty Hills Farms_, thanks for the advice on bee species. The bees I'm getting will be Carniolans. I picked them because I read that they survive winters better then Italians. I didn't know they were resistant to mites and diseases too.


I don't know what scale of beekeeping you are planning, but you can incorporate a couple of hives of VSH queens along with your Carnies. Then raise a few queens from the Carnies and make sure you have plenty of VSH drones to mate them. Or vice versa. That way you get the best of both strains and have a really good chance of hives with some nicely resistant workers.

HTH

Rusty


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## berzee (Mar 27, 2013)

When I start gardening in the spring and throughout the summer, I'll apply a spray of onion, pepper, and garlic to my plants to kill the tomato worms and aphids and such. I don't like using a lot of the commercial pesticides but the spray I make works well and kills or eliminates the bugs that would kill my plants. 
I guess I'm looking for a bit of the same sort of thing here. I'm not against treating bees. I suppose I'm not even really against chemicals but, because I'm going to be eating the honey the bees produce, I'd like to go as low-lethality as I possibly can.  Probably I should be asking, then, is: does anyone know any nifty ways of keeping the mites and SHB down that I can maybe make in my very own kitchen? Any beekeeping recipes akin to my anti-bug garden recipe? 
_Rusty_, I only have the one hive for now. I'll keep your advice in mind, though, for the future.

Also, on an only semi-related note, when I was researching oxalic acid, I found this cool website if anyone is interested: http://scientificbeekeeping.com/


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## rhaldridge (Dec 17, 2012)

Waterbird17 said:


> Look at it this way. as was told to me by the head apiarist in my state.
> 
> If your dog gets sick and you take it to the vet and it needs medicine, do you treat it?
> 
> ...


I'm not sure these are truly analogous situations, since individual bees are really just flying cells in a superorganism, and people and dogs are not. If you treat your dog, the worst that can happen is that he passes his illness-prone genetics on to his puppies. There's no superorganism of dogs that will die if enough dogs get sick enough. In addition, you can't take a split off a favorite dog and in a few weeks end up with a dog very similar to what you had before you started. (I sort of wish that were so; in the last six months we've spent several thousand bucks trying to keep our big Lab cross Izzy alive, and thank goodness, it looks like she'll survive.)

But, maybe another useful analogy is heroin addiction. A junkie soon reaches a point where the drug is no longer entertaining, and he has to keep taking it in order to avoid getting "sick." I understand that heroin withdrawal is a pretty rough kind of sickness, but still... is it a great idea to keep "treating" it?

Good doctors these days are fairly careful about passing out antibiotics, because the excessive use of antibiotics are breeding super bugs that are resistant to most (or all) antibiotics. If you read up on the subject, many medical research scientists are becoming concerned that new antibiotics that work against these super bugs are not being developed quickly enough. It is a familiar-sounding situation, isn't it?

Now, I've already become very fond of my bees, and I'll be sad if they die. That said, bees are livestock, not pets or children. They are, after all, boxes full of stinging bugs. If by not treating, and letting the weakest strains among them die, we can breed a better and more productive species, why wouldn't we want to?

Very few commercial beekeepers are in a position to take this sort of risk, or even consider it as a possibility, as I learned to my sorrow in a thread on treatment free beekeeping over on the commercial forum. But this past winter, some very highly regarded beekeepers have reported horrific losses in spite of treating, so some different approach is clearly needed. In my opinion, sideliners and devoted hobbyists might be in the best position to create the bees of the future... but I doubt if those bees are going to appear as a result of treating diseases and pests with the sort of stopgap, soon-to-be-ineffective treatments we've tried so far.


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## Acebird (Mar 17, 2011)

berzee said:


> 2) Does anyone have any other suggestions for "chemical free" treatments?
> Thanks!


berzee, what are your goals? What will make you happy?

I have never put anything in my hives including sugar past the first one that died because of a top feeder. I have endured extensive losses, three hives in three years and I have two survivals this year. My goal is to have one hive to pollinate the gardens.

Michael Bush is my idol but I do not have small cell or natural cell.

So the bottom line is, what are your goals?


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## beepro (Dec 31, 2012)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zd464K3u5aA

I don't mean to brag but so far they are doing a great job at cleaning themselves and each
others too. I split 4 hives and one got mated and laying now. Both Italians and Carni are
the hygenic bees. I have seen even 2 will help clean each others. Yes, it is possible to get the 
hygenic bees that are gentle to work with. So far the worse thing they done was only buzzing
in front of my face. No hard landing yet. I work them every morning checking for any
sign of possible mites infestation. But none I have seen from all the hives. Must be their excellent
grooming behaviors. Lots of carni drones flying now. No any kind of treatment done thus far.


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## cerezha (Oct 11, 2011)

Waterbird17 said:


> ....
> If your child gets sick and the doctor says they need medicine, do you treat them?...


 Very unwise logic. This is a way to create a pathogen, which is not sensitive to the treatment anymore. Right now, many people are suffering because even most advanced antibiotics do not work for them! There are bacterias "on the market", who actually may not be killed by ANY antibiotic! And, guess where such monsters are living? In the hospitals... If you or bees are healthy - you do not need a treatment. Treatment always must be a last resource. Somebody mentioned above that s/he uses antibiotics to treat ear-infection. In old days we used "camphor-spirit" for that, or geranium leaf (oil). If every minor problem is treated by antibiotics - this is a way to disaster.


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## Acebird (Mar 17, 2011)

cerezha said:


> If every minor problem is treated by antibiotics - this is a way to disaster.


Even if an animal is not sick it is treated with antibiotics because it might get sick. Isn't that logic sick?
How could we adopt this protocol for our food supply?


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## cerezha (Oct 11, 2011)

Rusty Hills Farm said:


> If it has been so devastating, then how come we manage to live longer and have a much higher survival rate among our infants and toddlers than they did in previous centuries?
> 
> Rusty


 Hi Rusty. Usually I completely agree with your posts, but not with this one. Unfortunately, our human population is aging - we are not able to extent a healthy, young part of our life, we are extending an aging period. Basically, the person, which supposed to die by natural cause is living longer... I am not sure that this is such great achievement for our civilization. Human population is overcrowded on the Earth, thus, increase in it (longer life and or more newborns) is not an achievement from the global "Mother-nature" prospective... sorry for such pessimistic approach...


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## Acebird (Mar 17, 2011)

Rusty Hills Farm said:


> If it has been so devastating, then how come we manage to live longer and have a much higher survival rate among our infants and toddlers than they did in previous centuries?
> 
> Rusty


Much easier lifestyle and we know a lot more about childbirth problems.
What you can't predict is how long these infants will live and what quality of life they will have. I bet it will not be as good.


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## KQ6AR (May 13, 2008)

Been beekeeping 5 years without chemicals, & my losses are lower than the club members who treat with chems.
Our 4 year loss average is about 19%.


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## deejaycee (Apr 30, 2008)

without getting into everything else.. 



rhaldridge said:


> individual bees are really just flying cells in a superorganism, and people and dogs are not. If you treat your dog, the worst that can happen is that he passes his illness-prone genetics on to his puppies. There's no superorganism of dogs that will die if enough dogs get sick enough.


I think you misunderstand the application of superorganism as used in beekeeping - the hive is the superorganism, not 'bees' as an entire population. 

bee = cells in dogs body. 
hive = single dog. 




rhaldridge said:


> In addition, you can't take a split off a favorite dog and in a few weeks end up with a dog very similar to what you had before you started.


A split off a hive is no less different to a parent hive than a pup to a ***** - probably more. In the case of the split a queen raised from a single egg of the parent hive carries only a subset of the parent hive's total genetics, just as a pup carries only half the genetics of its mother. In fact, considered that way... the new queen carries half her mother queen's genetics, but the genetics of only one of however many drones her mother mated with. So of the total genetic variability in the parent hive, if her mother mated with 10 drones, she carries half of her mothers genes, but only 1/10th of the drone gene pool.

Then of course, just as the ***** mated to produce the puppy - the super-organism - the new queen must mate with a range of drones to produce her hive superorganism. 

While the pup gets 50% of its genes from its mother, I reckon the example hive here shares only about 27.5% of the parent hive's genes. 

And then of course many splits do not raise their own queens... so ultimately may have no genetic tie at all.


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## deejaycee (Apr 30, 2008)

LOL - ok, sorry,... so read the multiple stars as 'the name for a female dog'

Barry, I swear I was being technically correct... not technically swearing.


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## Rusty Hills Farm (Mar 24, 2010)

Acebird said:


> Much easier lifestyle and we know a lot more about childbirth problems.


And why do we have this easier lifestyle and know more about childbirth? Science maybe? Science, of which medicine is a branch, is about understanding the world around us. It is not our enemy. MISUSING science is our enemy! That's what results in "super bugs" that we can no longer cure! But the proper application of science has lengthened our lives and allowed us to enjoy productive lives for those extra years. A century ago, most people my age were already dead and gone. Yet here I am still going strong. Still working every day. Still paying taxes. Still contributing to society. Thanks to science and what it has taught me about healthy living and responsible choices. 

JMO

Rusty


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## Luterra (Sep 7, 2011)

Two years ago I was a new beekeeper. Since then I have learned much, developed a bee allergy and been desensitized, and lost all my hives the first winter. This winter I brought through five out of five, three of which would not have made it without mite treatments. The fourth might have survived but got treated anyway, and the fifth I did not treat as it had almost no mites.

Here's my advice: Decide what kind of beekeeper you are. Are you the type, like me, who invests your heart and soul and a fair proportion of your limited financial resources into beekeeping? Or is beekeeping merely a side pursuit, like deciding to plant a few apple trees in the back yard, or getting a few chickens for fresh eggs? 

If you fall in the latter group, you can go treatment-free. You will probably lose hives to mites, unless you can get bees from an established treatment-free apiary and continue their practices. Even then you might lose hives to mites, if other hives in your area are heavily infested. But it will be no huge loss, rather like if the deer munch those apple trees, and you will start again next year or decide beekeeping isn't for you.

If you fall in the first group, then I recommend doing all you can to keep your bees alive the first year or two. You can draw the line somewhere, e.g. no synthetic chemicals that leave residues in wax, but do not be afraid to treat for mites if you see that your bees have more than a few. Despite the loud proclamations of some advocates of "natural" beekeeping, using mite treatments does not make you impure, contribute to the ongoing plight of the honeybee, or generally make you a bad person. Yes, it is in the best interests of both bees and beekeepers to develop bees that can withstand mites without chemicals. But that is a long, challenging, and ongoing effort, and not one that you need to take on in your first year with bees. When you have mastered the basics and come out of winter with multiple hives, then by all means start experimenting with treatment-free approaches.

Approaches like drone trapping and powdered sugar dusting require frequent inspections and handling of the bees. This exacerbates the new beekeeper tendency to open the hive weekly or more often. Don't. It is easy to crush or drop the queen with novice hands, and frequent disturbance will decrease the already-low chances of getting honey your first year. 

Formic acid, thymol, and oxalic acid are the mainstays of non-synthetic mite treatments. Commercial beekeepers use all three with good success. All can be hard on bees, but they do not leave harmful residues. Remember that bees are short-lived creatures, and the next generation will have no residual effect of the treatment but will be much better off for having lower mite loads. Count your mites in August, and treat if counts are high. Thymol and formic acid are good summer treatments. If they don't work (and they sometimes don't) or they don't work well, then follow up with oxalic in early December when the bees are broodless. Its effect is almost miraculous. If you had a heavy infestation you will see thousands of mites fall in a few days, and essentially zero thereafter. 

Manage mites because you can see them. Live and let die is not a good approach if you are emotionally invested in your bees' survival. As for the other two chemicals commonly placed in hives, fumagilin and terramycin, I don't especially recommend them. Terramycin suppresses (but does not kill) the bacterium that causes American Foulbrood (AFB). AFB is nasty (infected hives should be burned, pressure-sterilized, or irradiated) but is not common. If you see AFB your first year you are either very unlucky, you purchased contaminated equipment, or your supplier has a problem. Continuous prophylactic antibiotic treatment breeds resistance and is generally a bad idea. Fumagilin used to be a reliable nosema treatment but is significantly less effective against the new, now ubiquitous strain of the disease (N. ceranae). It is expensive and toxic to humans, and while it does degrade over time it is detectable in honey at low levels if used as recommended. If you really want to follow IPM, you can send a bee sample to a lab for nosema testing and treat if you have a high spore count.

You will probably not see AFB your first year, and you may or may not see nosema, but you will see mites in every hive. If winter survival is important to you, plan to do something about mites, and be open to using stronger, more effective non-synthetics (thymol, formic acid, oxalic acid) if softer methods are not working. These chemicals are a bit nasty in high concentrations, but they are all natural components of food (thymol in thyme and oregano, formic acid in fruits, oxalic acid in rhubarb and spinach), and any low concentrations persisting in honey will be entirely non-harmful.

Michael Bush will point out that essential oils (including thymol) and acids affect the microflora of the hive and bee gut, likely to the detriment of the bee. This is true, but mites vector viruses and suck hemolymph, to the very great detriment of the bee. Imagine one or two horseshoe crab-sized parasites attached to your body. They are a factor in most hive collapses, even if not the proximate cause.

Just the advice I would give to myself if I were starting fresh with bees...


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## libhart (Apr 22, 2010)

Luterra,

Extremely well written. Agree entirely.

I will mention to the OP that current research by Dr. Ellis at U of Nebraska is that sugar dusting will only get about 30% of the mites, and realize you're only getting the phoretic mites. Taking the time to dust every frame for a 30% drop is not worth your while at all.

Also, as Luterra wrote, count your mites. Do a real count with an alcohol wash or sugar roll (sugar rolls work because of sugar+heat). Don't just "look" at the bees to determine if you have a high mite load. You can't tell, at least not your first year.


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## rhaldridge (Dec 17, 2012)

Luterra said:


> Despite the loud proclamations of some advocates of "natural" beekeeping, using mite treatments does not make you impure, contribute to the ongoing plight of the honeybee, or generally make you a bad person.


Of course it doesn't make you impure or a bad person. The issue is: does it work? Or perhaps more to the point, will it continue to work longterm?

Sure, miticides will kill mites. But they don't kill every mite in the hive, usually, and those that survive to breed up again are mites that have demonstrated some degree of resistance to the chemicals used to kill them. Rinse, repeat, and sooner or later, the miticide will stop being an effective means of control. I don't think anyone would dispute this, since it has already happened. The beekeeper who starts this kind of treatment regimen has put himself in the position of hoping that pesticide developers will come out with some new miticide that will work... before they get run out of business. I just don't see how this is a sustainable approach.

Are you familiar with Kirk Webster, a Vermont commercial beekeeper who does not treat? His hives are not any more likely to die than the hives of many other commercial beekeepers, and less likely to die than the hives of some who treat. Recently there was an article in the NY Times about the rough winter many bigtime beekeepers have had. For example, the Adees, who, it is claimed, are the biggest beekeepers in the U.S, had 55 percent losses, and another big outfit from their neck of the woods had losses approaching 80 percent.

I think that perhaps the question new beekeepers should ask themselves is: are things getting better or worse for those who follow the regimen you recommend. At least some of the evidence suggests that the trend is not promising.


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## Luterra (Sep 7, 2011)

rhaldridge said:


> Of course it doesn't make you impure or a bad person. The issue is: does it work? Or perhaps more to the point, will it continue to work longterm?


Those are two different questions. If I have a colony with lots of mites in August, it will be more likely to overwinter if I kill 95% of the mites. Yes, I will probably need to treat again next year (maybe even next spring), but they will make honey. If they die I feel like a crappy beekeeper and they make no honey. On the other hand, I would rather have a colony that doesn't need treatment, and I will never succeed in breeding such a colony if I always treat.

As I tried to say, we need folks out there working hard to develop treatment-free bees. This is happening, as can be attested by the treatment-free board and early-adopter commercial beeks like Kirk Webster. My point is that new beekeepers with one or two hives are not going to substantially add to or detract from this overall effort, and it is therefore better to focus on keeping bees alive with all options on the table than to add the challenge of going treatment free. The typical newbie setup is a mail-order package with a mass-produced California queen, and as these have not been selected to handle mites without treatment, any attempt to go cold-turkey treatment free is likely to end in disappointment.


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## Aerindel (Apr 14, 2012)

> I treat ear infections with antibiotics, don't feel devastated.


The very fact that you use 'infections' plural proves my point. Constantly suffering from infections and having to use artificial cures is a treadmill going nowhere.


The difference is that with our own children and pets we don't care if we are weakening the species or creating stronger infections. We just want to help that creature, which is why we have a nation of sick children that can't live without medicine and animals that can't live without human intervention. 

I could go on and one about this subject but its something that everyone should have learned in highschool biology so I won't waste my time. These principles have been well understood for a hundred years and have been proven over and over again. Its not faith or green living or any type ideology. Its hard science and can be tested experimentally in your own home.

If you want to read an entertaining/terrifying book on exactly how badly our attempts to fight parasites have backfired I highly recommend this book, its a fast read and easy to understand for the layman.

http://www.amazon.com/New-Guinea-Ta...s=Jewish+grandmothers+and+new+guinea+tapworms



> Much easier lifestyle and we know a lot more about childbirth problems.
> What you can't predict is how long these infants will live and what quality of life they will have. I bet it will not be as good.


It al depends on what your goal is. If you judge success by how large your population is we have done very well, if you judge it by how strong that population is we are in terrible condition. We are mostly fat blind and on a host of chemicals that we must take daily to maintain even this pathetic condition. The very size of our population puts us in peril as well. Most of us are one week without power away from starvation and death. Our overwintering abilities are now worse than our bees.


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## rhaldridge (Dec 17, 2012)

Luterra said:


> Those are two different questions. If I have a colony with lots of mites in August, it will be more likely to overwinter if I kill 95% of the mites. Yes, I will probably need to treat again next year (maybe even next spring), but they will make honey. If they die I feel like a crappy beekeeper and they make no honey. On the other hand, I would rather have a colony that doesn't need treatment, and I will never succeed in breeding such a colony if I always treat.
> 
> As I tried to say, we need folks out there working hard to develop treatment-free bees. This is happening, as can be attested by the treatment-free board and early-adopter commercial beeks like Kirk Webster. My point is that new beekeepers with one or two hives are not going to substantially add to or detract from this overall effort, and it is therefore better to focus on keeping bees alive with all options on the table than to add the challenge of going treatment free. The typical newbie setup is a mail-order package with a mass-produced California queen, and as these have not been selected to handle mites without treatment, any attempt to go cold-turkey treatment free is likely to end in disappointment.


Well, I have to say that yours is a very reasonable attitude. I might be taking a more cold-blooded view of the situation than you are. I guess I'm not as concerned with the potential disappointment of new beekeepers, at least partly because I can't help but think that the disappointment is only being postponed. If even accomplished beekeepers are losing such tremendous portions of their outfits, the new beekeeper who treats probably doesn't have as good a chance as these beekeepers with their decades (and sometimes generations) of experience. (Though, to be fair, the stress of pollination shipment and monoculture nectar sources puts much greater stress on these outfits than the average backyard guy will have to deal with.)

I'm a new beekeeper myself. I'm not going to be shocked if my colonies expire from lack of treatment. I'll surely be sad and disappointed, but I guess the upside will be comb for next year, and the learning experience of caring for the colonies as long as they last. I did try to skew the odds a little in my favor. My first hive came from a nuc I bought from a local beekeeper who has had pretty good success in keeping his hives alive. So I do have local adaptation going or me. I know not every potential beekeeper will be lucky enough to do that, but my second hive will be started from a package of small cell untreated bees (coming this week, I hope!) I'm going to make nucs from these colonies, as insurance against the likelihood that the producing hives may collapse, and try to take advantage of the ensuing brood break to keep mites from reaching critical mass. Might not work, but again, I'll be learning. I'll at least have the satisfaction of knowing that if my bees die, I didn't push them over the edge by doing something to them that created a stressor that they would never encounter in the wild.

In May, I'm setting up a couple more hives in the North Country of upstate NY. I'm getting nucs from a NY beekeeper. Again, I'm hoping for a learning experience. I've made up a number of swarm traps to put on our property, because there's pretty good indications of feral colonies in the surrounding mix of woods and old rough pasture. Again, I plan to make up some nucs, in order to import some of the local genetics into my stock. 

I'm just a beginning hobbyist, with no ambition to ever run a commercial outfit. I'm too old and have too many other things to do before I kick the bucket. But there are, I discovered, things that can be done to avoid the certainty that my treatment free bees will quickly expire, and I'm doing everything I can along those lines. As an example, I'm going foundationless, (and so far my bees are drawing beautiful comb.)

I guess what I'm trying to say here is that if a new beekeeper wants to try going treatment free, maybe it would be more helpful to try to educate him in all the approaches he can take to try to keep his bees alive without treatment. With only a couple hives, he can't do much in the way of developing good genetics, other than requeening with resistant queens. But he can avoid killing off benign microflora in the hive and in the bees. (In the beginning beekeeper lecture at my club, the presenter showed us how he pours a bunch of terramycin into his hive several times a year.) He can avoid killing bees with treatments like formic acid. He can use brood breaks to knock down mite loads.

Maybe these things won't work, but at least he's learning about treatment free beekeeping, which is what he wanted to do. If he treats, then he's not learning what he wanted to learn about, and it seems like once you start treating, it's hard to get off that road. 

Better to lose a few hives, and learn what you can than to regret never giving what you really wanted to do a fair shot.


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## Nature Coast beek (Jun 10, 2012)

Read the latest ABJ (April 2013) interview with Dennis Van Engelsdorp (Bee Informed Partnership). He states (direct quote, exactly including all caps), " YOU NEED TO TREAT FOR MITES. It's astonishing to me how many don't! There seems to be a belief that if you just don't treat colonies in your back yard that suddenly resistance will spring up. This is nonsense in my opinion."

I think Luterra's post sums it up nicely. You have to decide for yourself what approach to take. I think there's a visceral resistance to treating bees since we extract and consume honey from those boxes! Beekeepers (in general) are a more "natural" minded lot from my experience. But, at the end of the day, I think one must remain grounded in reality when devising their beekeeping management goals/protocols in their apiary. Beekeeping is a MAJOR investment, no matter how much actual cash you lay out. Time = MONEY (the older I get the more real this becomes BTW) , and I think is overlooked by most. There are also tons of hidden costs such as gas, storage space and actual apiary footprint. At the end of the day, the* average* beekeeper as well as package producers and queen breeder isn't going to produce or sell bees that are going to beat the mite.

The best and the brightest in beekeeping all lose hives! Treating for mites successfully without harsh chemicals is also a reality. The REAL issue is whether you're going to treat (with something) or decide to go whole hog beekeeping and produce your own replenishment stock. For large commercial operations it's a simple business decision that is easy to quantify with pencil and paper. For the backyard beekeeper, more personal. Just how much time and resources are you going to/willing to invest in this hobby/way of life/addiction?


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## libhart (Apr 22, 2010)

rhaldridge said:


> His hives are not any more likely to die than the hives of many other commercial beekeepers, and less likely to die than the hives of some who treat.


Not true. I've come to believe that being successfully treatment free with a small number of hives is affected greatly by location. I'm envious of those who are in a location where they can successfully be treatment free with a small number of hives, but that is not my area as evidenced by the losses in my area for those who do not treat vs those who do. The Managed Pollinator CAP project is doing a multi-year study on the effect of location on colony mortality. To say that someone's bees in Vermont (or anywhere else for that matter) are no more likely to die than anyone else's is IMHO not the case at all.

http://www.beeccdcap.uga.edu/documents/DrummondCAPcolumnDec2012.pdf


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## cg3 (Jan 16, 2011)

> Treat ear infections with antibiotics





Aerindel said:


> having to use artificial cures is a treadmill going nowhere.


Well, I'm quite happy to have avoided deafness or an early grave. Somehow, it seems to have worked out, even though I have managed to pass along my inferior genes.


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## Dave Burrup (Jul 22, 2008)

When we stared beekeeping we intended to go non-chemical too. We bought mite resistant bees, and in subsequent years mite resistant queens. We never got a hive that did not reach threshhold for mites. I have stopped using tylosin unless there is a defanit need. We have spent a lot of money buying special queens with little reward. Like Michael Bush states any treatment will alter the flora and fauna of a hive, but of the beekeepers I know, the only ones with healthy bees treat. The development of mite resistant bees is the ultimate goal, but we are not there yet. What I do not understand is why MB techniques have not been more widely accepted and proliferated.
Dave


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## Waterbird17 (Apr 30, 2012)

cerezha said:


> ... If you or bees are healthy - you do not need a treatment. Treatment always must be a last resource.




that's the point, what i was trying to say was...if your bees are going to die due to a serious mite infestation, and related diseases. (sick). then knock down that mite population and save your bees.(treat them).

you would never medicate your kids if they are healthy. 


if giving your bees some other extract or oil knocks down the mites enough for the bees to survive a harsh winter then more power to ya.


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## rhaldridge (Dec 17, 2012)

Nature Coast beek said:


> Read the latest ABJ (April 2013) interview with Dennis Van Engelsdorp (Bee Informed Partnership). He states (direct quote, exactly including all caps), " YOU NEED TO TREAT FOR MITES. It's astonishing to me how many don't! There seems to be a belief that if you just don't treat colonies in your back yard that suddenly resistance will spring up. This is nonsense in my opinion."


Well, sure it's nonsense. But so is the statement "YOU NEED TO TREAT FOR MITES."

There are certain facts one can put forward to support a decision not to treat. One is that some beekeepers do not treat and their hives survive.

As an example, Michael Bush says that he no longer has problems with mites, even though they are present in his hives. If I lived in the same region as Michael, bought my bees or queens from Michael, and followed the cultural practices he does, why couldn't I expect to have the same success with mites? And far as the idea that "Time is Money," I think he would agree. He says he manages 200 hives with the same amount of time he once used to take care of a half dozen, if I remember correctly, and much of that time and effort saving comes from not doing stuff that the bee journal experts say beekeepers must do.

Well, I can't get his bees, this year anyway, and I don't live in his region, but that doesn't mean I have no other options.

Speaking of bee journals, I saw a pretty interesting article in the March Bee Culture, called _Why Treat for Varroa?_ According to the author, treating doesn't work a whole lot better than not treating, and he seems to have some data to back up this opinion. The marginal benefit of treating for Varroa was only 7 to 15 percent-- to put it another way, if you treat, you have a 7 to 15 percent survival advantage over someone who does not treat. In other words, a few more of your hives might die than his. This is an advantage that can be overcome fairly easily by a modest amount of increase. And really, how hard is it to split off a couple of nucs? If you use D. Coates' brilliant plywood nuc box plans, you can get 4 nucs out of a single sheet of plywood.

When you think about this, also consider the fact that any expert with a lick of sense will admit that over time, any particular chemical approach to mite control will become less effective. It always happens, with any pest that has a high reproductive rate, not just varroa. If you treat, you put yourself in the position of hoping that the developers can come up with something new before the current treatments become ineffective.

That's some major optimism, in the long term.

If treatment were a reliable way of keeping bees healthy, most sensible folks would do it. But the evidence suggests that it is not.


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## rhaldridge (Dec 17, 2012)

libhart said:


> Not true. I've come to believe that being successfully treatment free with a small number of hives is affected greatly by location. I'm envious of those who are in a location where they can successfully be treatment free with a small number of hives, but that is not my area as evidenced by the losses in my area for those who do not treat vs those who do. The Managed Pollinator CAP project is doing a multi-year study on the effect of location on colony mortality. To say that someone's bees in Vermont (or anywhere else for that matter) are no more likely to die than anyone else's is IMHO not the case at all.
> 
> http://www.beeccdcap.uga.edu/documents/DrummondCAPcolumnDec2012.pdf


Okay, let's say that his bees seem to be no more likely to die than nearby commercial beekeepers who treat, and that they survive better than some nearby beekeepers who treat. If we go by that interesting study you posted, Kirk Webster shouldn't have any hives left alive, since the test apiaries mostly died out completely after two or three years, including the one in Maine, very similar climatologically to Vermont. 

What I would have liked to have seen in that study is *treated* companion apiaries that were managed in exactly the same manner-- no increase, no requeening, etc, so we could see how many of those colonies could survive three years of benign neglect, except for Varroa treament. (I realize that wasn't the point of the study.)

The point I keep trying to make, and that no one seems to want to respond to is this: how sustainable is the practice of treating for mites? How long can we keep doing this and expecting that the outcome will somehow be different from what we see now--- more virulent mites, and increasingly less effective treatments?


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## Luterra (Sep 7, 2011)

I guess I should have allowed for a third type of new beekeeper: those who are both very invested and their bees and very invested in the idea of being treatment free. That can be a harder row to hoe, but it sounds like rhaldridge is doing all the right things (brood breaks, creating surplus colonies to make up for losses, small cell, foundationless, etc.). I wish him/her well, and suspect that the effort will pay off.

It's a bit like gardening. It's not hard to substitute certified organic pesticides (Bt, pyrethrins, Sluggo) for synthetic ones and still get a good crop. It's much more challenging to garden with no chemicals whatsoever. There are plenty of folks that do it, but as with mite control there are factors involved (pathogen-suppressive soils, micronutrient fertilizers, beneficial insects, resistant varieties) that are site-specific and/or not well understood, such that they are not yet universally applicable. It's a worthwhile endeavor, but for someone just getting started with gardening I would recommend using the organic controls, as anyone losing all their lettuce to slugs and all their beans to bean beetles will quickly conclude that gardening is hard. Gardening should be fun, and once you've gotten a few good harvests you can start experimenting with omitting the chemicals without risking severe disappointment.

Similarly, it's not hard to use thymol, formic acid, and oxalic acid instead of synthetic pesticides like coumaphos and fluvalinate and still keep mite loads in check. ("Organic" standards have not been finalized for beekeeping, so we can argue about whether these would fit the definition, but given that they are naturally-occurring compounds in food I'm willing to accept them.) As with gardening, going the next step and forgoing chemicals entirely is much more difficult. The learning curve is steeper, and there are tradeoffs involved (higher losses especially early on, more splits = less honey). Factors required for success are not well-understood and may be location-specific (e.g. microclimate, mite loads of other hives in the area, locally-adapted genetics). There is no denying the success of those who have been treatment-free for years and see losses lower than the national average. At the same time, those who have been successful have not yet been able to write a foolproof prescription for success that will work anywhere. As an example, most (but not all) treatment-free beekeepers use small-cell, but side-by-side comparisons have not been able to show that small-cell bees have fewer mites. I think we will get there eventually, possibly even in the next five years. Once there is a "recipe for success" to manage mites without treatments then more and more beekeepers will choose to go that route.

Beekeeping should be fun. Watching your bees die isn't fun. Overwintering hives is the hardest aspect of beekeeping, and for new beekeepers having their sole hive (or two or three) die the first winter feels like failure. So I say treat for mites, unless you are absolutely committed to not treating and have done some research into treatment-free methods. I don't buy the argument that once you start treating you will always treat. I feel a lot better overwintering five out of five (one of which was untreated) than I did my first winter at zero out of two (both untreated). Once I believe I have developed the skills to keep bees successfully (and I'm getting close to that point), I will feel more comfortable forgoing treatment, as any subsequent losses will then feel like a management outcome rather than failure on my part.


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## Lburou (May 13, 2012)

berzee, you can see that one's philosophy to treat or not to treat is a polarizing subject on any bee forum. 

I've just come back to beekeeping after almost a 20 year absence. Back then it was easy to be treatment free. Today, with arrival of a new nosema, small hive beetle, varroa mites and an idiopathic brood syndrome the bees are under attack every moment of every day. 

I laud the researchers looking for bees and genes that resist viruses & disease while aiding resistance to mites, but their work, and the evolution of bees to live with these mites, is a slow deliberate process, sometimes with two steps backward. 

For the moment, I've chosen the IPM philosophy to help keep the bees alive, while others more gifted than myself, search for the genetic secrets that help the bees deal with these problems that kill colonies.

I have to tell you that my bees do not have many mites, thanks to Minnesota hygienic, BWeaver's survivors, and some feral bees that found their way to my house. The powdered sugar and hopguard treatments have been successful. I've ordered an oxalic acid vaporizer should the need present itself, but that is in reserve for a really sick hive.

I do not criticize natural beekeepers, realizing their view is as valid as my own. But, I will do everything I can to have queens that head healthy colonies, intervening with whatever treatment is necessary (I don't ever expect to use synthetic miticides however). HTH


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## Moonfire (Apr 2, 2013)

ok so this is a little off topic but I'm new to the game, starting this year and plan on being treatment free. I have not been able to find anything that answers my question  , maybe you guys can help?! I was wondering, where exactly do bees get mites and hive beetles from? My hive ( I only have 1) is on in an isolated area 35 miles from the nearest town in the sierra nevada mountains. to my knowlege, there are not other beekeepers around. Do bees get them from robbing? are they just naturally occuring? do all or most beekeepers have this problem? I would really like to know how likely my bees are to get them?


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## Rusty Hills Farm (Mar 24, 2010)

Sometimes they come with the package/nuc. Sometimes they travel from nearby hives that have them. Sometimes you spread them yourself by adding a frame of brood to a hive that needs it. Or if they rob out a hive dying from mites. There are lots of ways.

As to how likely you'll have them or get them, well, much depends on your own area of the country. Do beeks around you have them?

HTH

Rusty


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## Moonfire (Apr 2, 2013)

I would like to add to the discussion about treating kids or dogs vs bees... If my daughter has head lice, I have many choices... I can go to the Dr. and get perscription bug killer, go to the store and buy over the counter bug killer, go under my kitchen sink and use vinegar, cover her head with baby oil, or use a fine toothed comb and tweezers after her bath and pick all those little suckers out myself (while this may seem teadious and time consuming, I would rather not dump a buch of pesticides on my childs head so any of the non-chemical routes would be my first choice everytime!). I do not use pesticide flea drops or chemical shampoos on my dog for fleas and ticks, I use all natural non-chemical shampoos infused with clove and cedar oil, it works wonders and my dog smells terrific!! that being said, I believe that Berzee asked for the same kind of thing.... Is ther infact some naturallly occuring thing that these mites can't stand to be around, that won't hurt the bees, much like cedar bark for fleas? does anyone know? if not... then I say it's time we find out!!


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## rhaldridge (Dec 17, 2012)

Luterra said:


> It's a bit like gardening. It's not hard to substitute certified organic pesticides (Bt, pyrethrins, Sluggo) for synthetic ones and still get a good crop. It's much more challenging to garden with no chemicals whatsoever.


I like this analogy. I don't blame any organic gardener for using stuff like BT and pyrethrins, and I've done it myself, but the long term goal of an organic gardener should not be avoiding chemical inputs. It should be to create such good soil that the plants grown in it can withstand most pests untreated and still give a good crop. This is something that critics and "debunkers" of organic gardening either fail to get, or disengenuously ignore. They plow up some bad soil, throw seeds in it and fertilize and spray half the test garden, and of course that half does a lot better than the "organic" half. They conclude that organic gardening doesn't work. 




Luterra said:


> As an example, most (but not all) treatment-free beekeepers use small-cell, but side-by-side comparisons have not been able to show that small-cell bees have fewer mites.


I've looked at a couple of those studies, and I wasn't terribly impressed with the protocols used. For example, in the Berry study, she had small cell bees draw out comb for her test colonies, and large cell bees draw out comb for the control colonies. But when it came time to install the bees in the colonies, she mixed them all together, in an effort to randomize her inputs. So she had a mix of bees in every hive. Additionally, these were not longterm studies, and relied completely on comparing Varroa counts after a short period. I'm not sure what conclusions can be drawn from the study, at least in relationship to the longterm survival of small cell colonies.




Luterra said:


> Once I believe I have developed the skills to keep bees successfully (and I'm getting close to that point), I will feel more comfortable forgoing treatment, as any subsequent losses will then feel like a management outcome rather than failure on my part.


I think this is good thinking!

Ray


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## Luterra (Sep 7, 2011)

Varroa mites do not survive outside of hives. If your hive is truly isolated from other honeybees by 10 miles or more, and you could somehow purchase bees with zero mites, you might be able to keep a mite-free hive. Unfortunately all package bees and nucs in the US will have some mites, and even with a brood break there will be survivors.

It would be an interesting experiment to take a package of bees, treat them several times with oxalic acid vapor to (hopefully) kill 100% of the mites, install them in an isolated location, and see if they would remain mite-free. It might just be possible...


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## Moonfire (Apr 2, 2013)

Rusty Hills Farm said:


> Do beeks around you have them?
> 
> That is a very good point... I guess I should be asking around. I just didn't think to because I have them so far away from other beekeepers.
> I will get on that right away! thank you!


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## cerezha (Oct 11, 2011)

Nature Coast beek said:


> Read the latest ABJ (April 2013) interview with Dennis Van Engelsdorp (Bee Informed Partnership). He states (direct quote, exactly including all caps), " YOU NEED TO TREAT FOR MITES....


It is non-sense to me! If I have feral/survival bees, who NEVER saw the "treatment", why I have to damage them by chemicals? There is another aspect in this endless discussion - see, any organism, which did not see "treatment", would respond differently on the "treatment" than organism, which was regularly treated. Treatment (any) itself changed the physiology of the body. I would expect that treated subjects would have better tolerance to the chemicals used for treatment. Chronically untreated subjects would probably die from the normal full dose of "treatment"... Also, I do not see any reason to keep sick bees. Parallel between the kid treated against illness and beehive chronically treated is not a good comparison. If I decided to keep, horses, for instance - I will make sure that they are healthy. Once I have them, I'll do everything possible to keep them healthy, so the treatment is unnecessary. Of coarse, in emergency situation, treatment may be necessary, but it is emergency, it is not everyday (every fall/spring) practice. 

Such statements (" YOU NEED TO TREAT FOR MITES....) published in respected journal made me think about biases in its publications.


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## cerezha (Oct 11, 2011)

Moonfire said:


> ... Is ther infact some naturallly occuring thing that these mites can't stand to be around, that won't hurt the bees, much like cedar bark for fleas? does anyone know? if not... then I say it's time we find out!!


 I think thyme and its oil is most close to "natural" treatment. Also, I heard that mint candy used to mitigate mites in old days. I have a lot of thyme in my garden and bees love it. May be, it is a part of unintentional treatment for my bees?


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## Moonfire (Apr 2, 2013)

cerezha said:


> I heard that mint candy used to mitigate mites in old days.
> 
> So... since I posted that question, I have been searching around different sites and so far I have read that planting mint, lavendar, thyme, and...there was another one that I can't remember... anyway if you plant them around your hives, supposedly you will have less of a mite problem because mites don't like these plants! On that note, I think I will give this idea a go and keep records of the progress! I don't really want to "put thing in" my hives, so I'm going to put thing out of it!!
> 
> Also, I do think that most all things natural have a natural counter, like manzanita berries healing poison oak or basil enhancing tomatoes and preventing pests, and cedar repelling fleas!! I'm thinking that this is probably something that I will be getting into in a major way for my bees, I'm feeling pretty intrigued by the idea!


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## Rick 1456 (Jun 22, 2010)

I really think it would be a hard roe to hoe to start bee keeping and be TF. Doesn't mean it couldn't be done. Would recommend a mentor of some sort and a stock of bees that the odds are in their favor of surviving TF. IMHO, a big key to success, is determination to do it,,,,accept the fact that you may/will loose some hives,,,you may have to start over,,,,and that it is NOT failure if that happens. This is what has worked for me. This is my fifth season TF. Relatively new compared to some. Some may not agree but IMO, when the bar is set higher the rewards are more satisfying. I'm not anti treatment,,,,it is just not for me. 
Rick


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## Cloverdale (Mar 26, 2012)

to RHALDRIGE...Hello and good evening...I live in upstate NY in the Catskills and tried beekeeping the first time last year and lost my hive to varroa in the Fall; I has purchased a NUC from a successful beekeeper about 2 hours north of me...I am starting again in a month with 2 packages from Texas and a NUC from a local beekeeper....I am curious as to why you want to have hives up here if you live in Florida and can I ask who you purchased your bee's from in NY? Thanks.


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## CaBees (Nov 9, 2011)

Wow, hot topic and can't read them all! But I am treatment free so far and waiting for the big 'fall' others tell me should come -- maybe next year I guess since it did not come this year. I am part of a group that promotes survival stock hence, in the fall if we have weak hives we requeen and/or combine them; do not treat or feed and propogate only the once who are strong survivors. This is going back to the basic passing on the stronger genetics and traits that allow the hive to survive. Some of the ways they survive: by going into a natural dearth 2x a year and breaking the brood cycle which breaks the mite breeding cycle, shrinking, expanding and allowing the bees to MOVE up and down the hive (no queen excluders), allow them to create their own comb how they see fit and like I said, proprogating the strong hives, getting rid of the weaklings. I know "I" feel better about eating my honey and raising bees that are strong in my climate and surviving all the artificial problems we've made or imported for them. And I did not learn this stuff from no where...we have many good, successful beekeepers here on the left coast that are doing and passing on the same exact thing. Good luck to you!


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## TheBuzz (Feb 8, 2012)

This is my 2nd year beeking and I only used sugar as my only supplement last year. I would suggest if you get a package of southern bees you get a northern Queen. Or try finding a over wintered nuc in OH. 
1) you get drawn comb for pollen storage already
2) they survived winter up north.

This year more will likely they'll begin swarming as they spent last year drawing comb in their double deeps.


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## berzee (Mar 27, 2013)

Wow, I really didn't expect this many replies! Thanks for the advice everyone. 
I have quite a lot to research now: IPM, beehive companion planting, etc. There's always more to learn!  
For now, I think, I'll go with what was said by Luterra and Lburou (and possibly some others?) and do what it takes to keep my one hive alive while drawing a line at synthetic pesticides.


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## trance (Mar 29, 2013)

I did a quick Goggle search, I guess there is a VHS Varroa Sensitive Hygiene VSH

http://www.glenn-apiaries.com/vsh.html#anchor119282

Any thoughts? Anyone have these?


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## rhaldridge (Dec 17, 2012)

Cloverdale said:


> to RHALDRIGE...Hello and good evening...I live in upstate NY in the Catskills and tried beekeeping the first time last year and lost my hive to varroa in the Fall; I has purchased a NUC from a successful beekeeper about 2 hours north of me...I am starting again in a month with 2 packages from Texas and a NUC from a local beekeeper....I am curious as to why you want to have hives up here if you live in Florida and can I ask who you purchased your bee's from in NY? Thanks.


I'm a native New Yorker; the North Country still feels like home to me. Our children are raised, and last summer we bought a few acres along the edge of the Adirondacks, and hope to have a cabin there. I'm going up to do some site development this spring, and the area seems very well suited to bees, so I'd like to get started.

I'm getting my nucs from Joel Klose at Nature's Way Farm in the Finger Lakes.


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## Nature Coast beek (Jun 10, 2012)

rhaldridge said:


> If treatment were a reliable way of keeping bees healthy, most sensible folks would do it. But the evidence suggests that it is not.


How so? The latest mass survey, Bee Informed Partnership, is showing a trend that losses sustained by those that treat vs. non-treat is significantly different 20% fewer hives lost. Only about 39% of beekeepers surveyed treat at all. The majority are treatment free. Sure, treating doesn't mean you will not have losses, but overall, the lower losses. Lower losses to the tune of 20% fewer than non-treatment. You even quote a 7 - 15% better rate in losses. A 20% relative risk reduction is pretty darn effective. Put it this way, if you had cancer and your chance of it reoccurring was 35% without any further treatment or reduced by 20% with chemo, what would you do? Again, I'm not here to persuade anyone on anything, but the data is the data.


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## Acebird (Mar 17, 2011)

I have been hearing how difficult it is to go treatment free. I been hearing the horror stories of mass devastation if you don't treat your bees. I am wondering how many years into non-intervention beekeeping that this is suppose to happen.


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## cerezha (Oct 11, 2011)

Nature Coast beek said:


> .. The latest mass survey, Bee Informed Partnership, is showing a trend that losses sustained by those that treat vs. non-treat is significantly different 20% fewer hives lost. ..


 Could you provide a direct link to the document? I was not able to find it. What I DID find is that according USDA, mite counts are steadily increases each year between 2009 and 2011 (for 2012-2013 data is not available). If so, I do not understand how treatment helps if mites are growing? At the same time, all other pathogens are growing also - I do conclusion that bees are getting more sick, right?
http://www.aphis.usda.gov/plant_hea...ees/downloads/2011_National_Survey_Report.pdf
page 10 Fig 6


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## cg3 (Jan 16, 2011)

http://beeinformed.org/2012/03/national-management-survey-varroa-control/
Losses down last year, up the year before. Sicker? Who knows?


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## cerezha (Oct 11, 2011)

cg3 said:


> http://beeinformed.org/2012/03/national-management-survey-varroa-control/
> ...


 Many thanks, it was not the actual document, but I figured out. The actual document location is there:
http://beeinformed.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Varroa-managment.pdf
Soooo. Very interesting. There is MY summary BASED on data presented in the document:
1). Effect of known treatment is noticeable only in the northern states in US. * There is NO difference in southern states.*
2). *ApiGuard *provides statistically proven (to me) evidence of reducing bee-lost by 10%, very impressive. 
3). ApiLife - 9%. Formic Acid - 6%. _Note: these two are at the border line, practically no effect, but document stated 9% and 6% effect._
4). Coumaphos, Fluvalinate, Sucrocide, herbal products including thymol, garlic powder, menthol, wintergreen, and mint oils,
Powdered Sugar, Mineral Oil, Drone Brood Removal, Screen Bottom Board, Small Cell Size Comb *- ALL, NO effect!*


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## cerezha (Oct 11, 2011)

cg3 said:


> ...Losses down last year, up the year before. Sicker? Who knows?


 My point was that treatment was not able to stop the tendency of increasing mites counts over the past 4 years. More mites on the bee - more sick bee (to me). Based on their data, mites counts increased nearly by factor of 2 each year - it is quite alarming. It was 2/100 bees in 2009 and it is 6/100 in 2011.


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## rhaldridge (Dec 17, 2012)

Nature Coast beek said:


> How so? The latest mass survey, Bee Informed Partnership, is showing a trend that losses sustained by those that treat vs. non-treat is significantly different 20% fewer hives lost. Only about 39% of beekeepers surveyed treat at all. The majority are treatment free. Sure, treating doesn't mean you will not have losses, but overall, the lower losses. Lower losses to the tune of 20% fewer than non-treatment. You even quote a 7 - 15% better rate in losses. A 20% relative risk reduction is pretty darn effective. Put it this way, if you had cancer and your chance of it reoccurring was 35% without any further treatment or reduced by 20% with chemo, what would you do? Again, I'm not here to persuade anyone on anything, but the data is the data.


I'm not following your arithmetic. Here's a quote from the article in Bee Culture that references the Bee Informed Partnership survey:



> ...based on actual Varroa treatment, mortality was 29.5 percent when any Varroa product was used, and 36.7 percent when no product was used.


So, 7 percent better survival rate when treating. I don't think that's enough better to accept all the other costs of treating, especially the breeding of resistant mites.

Lots of interesting data here:

http://beeinformed.org/2012/03/bee-informed-national-management-survey-2010-2011/

I particularly enjoyed "Losses by management philosophy."


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## cg3 (Jan 16, 2011)

>My point was that treatment was not able to stop the tendency of increasing mites counts over the past 4 years. More mites on the bee - more sick bee (to me). Based on their data, mites counts increased nearly by factor of 2 each year - it is quite alarming.<
Only 39% treat. How's that affect the spin?


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## Deepsouth (Feb 21, 2012)

When I started beekeeping 8 years ago a decided to do it treatment free. All my hives came from swarms that I caught. Last year 25 went into winter and 25 came out of winter and most were very strong. I know it is very possible to have healthy hives without treatments because im doing it and im by no means an expert. I don't know how people think bees cant survive without treatments because my area is loaded with feral colonies. I know of feral colonies that I have watched for over 8 years and their still living.


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## libhart (Apr 22, 2010)

rhaldridge said:


> So, 7 percent better survival rate when treating. I don't think that's enough better to accept all the other costs of treating, especially the breeding of resistant mites.


I think that's a much bigger difference than it appears to be. 

Consider this. Let's say I want to ensure I lose no more than half my hives, thinking that I'll make up my losses with splits. Nothing is guaranteed but I'm putting time,effort,money into this, so I want to have a 95% chance of success (success=lose no more than half). If we treat the probability of a hive dying as a binomial distribution, so like flipping a coin with a 36.7% of tails (dying) and a 63.3% chance of heads (living), I need to have 26 hives to make that happen, to get to my 95% chance of success. If I lower my loss rate to 29.5% so my coin now only has a 29.5% chance of tails, I only need to have 10 hives to make my 95% chance of success. So thinking about keeping 150% more hives to hit my success rate, that 7% drop in the likelihood of dying is a big deal.


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## libhart (Apr 22, 2010)

Deepsouth,

That's really cool, but not all areas are created equally. In fact they're extremely different. Yes, other beekeepers in your area can probably do it and be successful as well, but because you can do it where you are doesn't mean that the entire country can be treatment free. It's the real estate mantra...location, location, location.


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## cg3 (Jan 16, 2011)

rhaldridge said:


> I'm not following your arithmetic.


36.7 x .80 =29.36


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## cerezha (Oct 11, 2011)

cg3 said:


> ...Only 39% treat. How's that affect the spin?


 yes, 10% out of 40% = 4% efficiency of the treatment, very low


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## Colleen O. (Jun 5, 2012)

Moonfire said:


> So... since I posted that question, I have been searching around different sites and so far I have read that planting mint, lavendar, thyme, and...there was another one that I can't remember... anyway if you plant them around your hives, supposedly you will have less of a mite problem because mites don't like these plants! On that note, I think I will give this idea a go and keep records of the progress! I don't really want to "put thing in" my hives, so I'm going to put thing out of it!!


I believe the other plant is Oregano. I planted that, thyme, and lavender around my hives. I also have rosemary but that was there before the hives and I am not sure if it repels mites. I already had a few lavender plants around the yard because I love them and when I saw the bees shared the love and learned mites don't it was enough for me to add more.


On the antibiotic line...I don't blindly take what is prescribed. I have had a doctor give me Cipro, which is what they give you for the big nasties like Anthrax, and after reading what the side effects could be I called and made him give me something else on the mild side. No way was I taking that unless it was do or die. For a lot of things I go with the homeopathic approach.


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## Deepsouth (Feb 21, 2012)

libhart said:


> Deepsouth,
> 
> That's really cool, but not all areas are created equally. In fact they're extremely different. Yes, other beekeepers in your area can probably do it and be successful as well, but because you can do it where you are doesn't mean that the entire country can be treatment free. It's the real estate mantra...location, location, location.


I do agree with location is important. I guess I take it for granted how easy beekeeping is in the south.


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## Roland (Dec 14, 2008)

To the OP, look for threads by StevenG from S.E. Mo. I have spoken with him in person twice, and found him to be logical and intelligent, with a supporting understanding of the ways of the bees.I would read his posts, and then contact him.

We do not use any chemicals to combat mites, and are a small commercial outfit. It can be done, but requires a much higher level of beekeeping skills. As for the bees adapting to the mites, don't hold your breath. I believe it is quicker to breed a weaker mite than to breed a stronger bee.

Crazy Roland


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## Luterra (Sep 7, 2011)

Really difficult to draw meaningful conclusions from these data. 39% of beekeepers treated but 86% of hives were treated. Beekeepers that treat managed an average of 142 colonies; non-treating beekeepers managed an average of 15. 

So...beekeepers that don't treat are mostly hobbyists; most commercials and sideliners treat (with a fair number of hobbyists in that group as well bringing the average down).

We have some confounding factors. Commercial hives might be expected to have lower losses due to more experienced management; on the other hand they might have higher losses due to the stresses of migratory operations. Are we seeing a difference due to management style or due to treatment?

Also, the act of treating for mites does not guarantee low mite counts going into winter. For various reasons treatments are often ineffective, with follow-up treatments required. Whole-country surveys can't really be used to prove whether mite treatments improve winter survival.

What proportion of colonies with 20% mite infestation (20 mites/100 bees) in fall survive winter?
What proportion of colonies with 5% infestation survive?
What proportion of colonies with 1% infestation survive?
I don't have the answers in front of me, but there are some data out there.

If a colony with 20% infestation has a 70% chance of dying over winter, and a colony with 1% infestation has a 20% chance of dying, and I can kill 95% of mites (from 20% to 1%) with a series of treatments, should I treat?

The answer to that depends on my beekeeping philosophy. Is it more important to preserve my investment for more honey next year, or is it more important to improve the long-term health of my bees by culling (or letting nature cull) mite-susceptible colonies?

My personal philosophy is to keep bees alive but not to propagate bad genetics. For example I will treat a hive with high mite loads going into winter but will try to requeen it with more resistant stock in spring.


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## rhaldridge (Dec 17, 2012)

cg3 said:


> 36.7 x .80 =29.36


Oh, I see.

I guess another way of looking at these numbers is... if you have 10 hives and you treat, (and if you lose an average number of hives) you'll lose 3 of them. If you don't treat, you'll lose between 3 and 4 hives. Because the average lies between 3 and 4, in this case a little less than half those who treat will average a loss of 3 hives, same as those who treat, and a little more than half of those who don't treat will average a 4 hive loss.

I just can't see that as so beneficial an effect that I'd want to be breeding more virulent mites and damaging the hives' microflora and fauna. It seems a poor trade-off to me, and to completely debunk the experts who thunder that you *must* treat for mites. 

I have to admit that I'm not interested in making a lot of honey-- I don't know what I'd do with it. I'm more interested in just learning about beekeeping, so I know that my perspective will be shared primarily with other hobbyists. But it doesn't take a lot of effort to make up a half-dozen nucs, so far as I can tell, especially if you don't care a lot about making huge amounts of honey. In my hypothetical 10 hive yard, that would likely make up for the average losses in untreated hives.

I might be wrong, but as the virulence of mites increases, and chemical treatments continue to lose efficacy, I think I'd rather be on the side of the ledger that concentrates on having bees healthy enough that they can survive without treatment. There are people doing this successfully, for whom mites are no longer a problem. Can any beekeepers who treat say the same? I think the answer is obvious. If they didn't have a mite problem, why would they treat?


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## rhaldridge (Dec 17, 2012)

Roland said:


> I believe it is quicker to breed a weaker mite than to breed a stronger bee.
> 
> Crazy Roland


 Either one would be an improvement, I guess. Folks who treat can forget about breeding weaker mites...

Isn't there a theory among some evolutionary biologists that pests like varroa, if left to work things out, tend to develop less virulence? I believe the thinking is that a parasite that is too rough on its host species thereby reduces its opportunities to reproduce, and a parasite that allows its host to survive will have better longterm reproductive prospects than the one that kills its host quickly.


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## jim lyon (Feb 19, 2006)

rhaldridge said:


> Either one would be an improvement, I guess. Folks who treat can forget about breeding weaker mites...
> 
> Isn't there a theory among some evolutionary biologists that pests like varroa, if left to work things out, tend to develop less virulence? I believe the thinking is that a parasite that is too rough on its host species thereby reduces its opportunities to reproduce, and a parasite that allows its host to survive will have better longterm reproductive prospects than the one that kills its host quickly.


In the case of varroa that may not necessarily be true. The really odd thing about their reproductive habits is that as long as their populations remain low they continue to inbreed. It isn't until the populations get high enough for a colony to collapse and be robbed out that cross breeding of varroa occurs to any extent. It seems entirely believable to me that the longer you control your mite numbers the less virulent varroa will become. if there is one thing that probably everyone can agree on its that the best and most desirable control of a pest occurs when their reproduction can be affected and not by killing adults.


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## cg3 (Jan 16, 2011)

Luterra said:


> Really difficult to draw meaningful conclusions from these data. 39% of beekeepers treated but 86% of hives were treated. Beekeepers that treat managed an average of 142 colonies; non-treating beekeepers managed an average of 15.
> 
> So...beekeepers that don't treat are mostly hobbyists; most commercials and sideliners treat (with a fair number of hobbyists in that group as well bringing the average down).


Well, there you go. We backyard beekeepers, regardless of treating or not, are unlikely to have much effect overall. So I would not automatically assume the OP needs a lecture, but tell him to do whatever makes sense to him.


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## libhart (Apr 22, 2010)

rhaldridge said:


> I guess another way of looking at these numbers is... if you have 10 hives and you treat, (and if you lose an average number of hives) you'll lose 3 of them. If you don't treat, you'll lose between 3 and 4 hives.


It doesn't really work out that cleanly. If each hive has a 30% of loss, and they're each independent trials, like flipping a coin. We know that if we flip a coin an infinite number of times, half will come up heads, half tails. But if I flip it 10 times, each combination of counts has a probability, so I could get all tails, that's possible, and it has a probability, albeit a low one, but it's possible. I have a probability of getting 3 tails and 7 heads, that's closer to half-and-half, so that probability is a little higher. When I start saying things like "at least 3 tails", there are formulas with lots of sums that tell us how to calculate this. The sums are so annoying and long to calculate that before computers there were tables where you'd look up these probabilities.

So think of the hives the same way. If each hive has a 36.7% chance of loss, and you have an infinite number of them, your loss will tend toward 36.7%. But if you have 10 hives or 20, each combination of death/live has a probability. So my numbers are such that with a 36.7% chance of death for each hive, if I want to have less than a 5% chance of losing more than half my hives, I need 26 hives to make that happen. With 26 hives, the chance of having more than 13 die is less than 5%. You can caculate any percentage you'd like though. With those 26 hives and a chance of loss at 36.7% for each hive, what's my percentage of losing at least 10 of those? 50%. You've got a 50% chance of losing 10 hives or more, because that includes the probability of losing 10, 11, 12, 13, 14....all the way to 26. If I lower the chance of loss to 29.5%, what's the chance of losing 10 hives or more? 21%. Now I only have a 21% chance of losing 10 hives or more. My point is I believe that every point you shave from the chance of loss makes a fairly large difference. It isn't just the difference of a fraction of a hive.


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## D Semple (Jun 18, 2010)

Deepsouth said:


> When I started beekeeping 8 years ago a decided to do it treatment free. All my hives came from swarms that I caught. Last year 25 went into winter and 25 came out of winter and most were very strong. I know it is very possible to have healthy hives without treatments because im doing it and im by no means an expert. I don't know how people think bees cant survive without treatments because my area is loaded with feral colonies. I know of feral colonies that I have watched for over 8 years and their still living.


Cool.

We have lots of feral hives in my area also and I have built our apiaries up the exact same way. (hard drought here though and my overwintering losses this year are going to be close to 25%).


Libhart:
Re: Loaction, location, location

Joe Waggle keeps feral caught treatment free bees in your neck of the woods.


Don


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## libhart (Apr 22, 2010)

Oh I wish it was that simple inch:

PA's a big state with lots of different regions. Mr. Waggle is over in Westmoreland Co. Did a little looking....17% agriculture, 50% forested, whole county is about 645K acres. Lancaster Co., which produces the most agriculture of any non-irrigated county in the entire country, is 67% agriculture, whole county is about 629K acres.


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## rhaldridge (Dec 17, 2012)

jim lyon said:


> In the case of varroa that may not necessarily be true. The really odd thing about their reproductive habits is that as long as their populations remain low they continue to inbreed. It isn't until the populations get high enough for a colony to collapse and be robbed out that cross breeding of varroa occurs to any extent. It seems entirely believable to me that the longer you control your mite numbers the less virulent varroa will become.


That's an interesting thought. Do you know of anyone who has treated and whose mites have become less virulent?


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## rhaldridge (Dec 17, 2012)

libhart said:


> You've got a 50% chance of losing 10 hives or more, because that includes the probability of losing 10, 11, 12, 13, 14....all the way to 26. If I lower the chance of loss to 29.5%, what's the chance of losing 10 hives or more? 21%. Now I only have a 21% chance of losing 10 hives or more. My point is I believe that every point you shave from the chance of loss makes a fairly large difference. It isn't just the difference of a fraction of a hive.


Are you taking into consideration the confidence interval they show? Are they not saying that 95% of their observations on the effect of non treatment fall between a loss rate of 34.9% and 38.5%? To slightly paraphrase one explanation: "If the true value of the parameter lies outside the 95% confidence interval once it has been calculated, then an event has occurred which had a probability of 5% (or less) of happening by chance." In other words, the chance of losing more than 4 hives, in my 10 hive scenario, is less than 5%, by chance.

I take a little comfort from the fact that treatment free beekeepers tend to be hobbyists and sideliners. I'm not saying we're dumber than the commercial guys, but we have a lot less experience. That may skew the percentages... a survey of treatment and treatment-free results from beekeepers of similar experience would be very interesting. There is a breakdown by "size of operation" and as you might expect, there is a marginal difference of 5 points between backyard and commercial operators. The folks who prepared the survey characterized this as "No significant difference," but if you were to integrate that difference with the 7 point difference between treating and not treating, you might end up with an insignificant difference, since as I mention above, they consider a 5 point marginal difference to be without significance. In their protocol a 5 point difference is "not significant" but a 6 point difference is.

Here's what I think. That 7 point marginal difference is probably significant to someone with a thousand hives, not so much to someone with a backyard apiary. But even so, it's the trends that concern me. I'm not aware of anyone treating who claims that their mite problems from year to year are declining. I am aware of folks who don't treat and who make that claim, and in Michael Bush's case, he has the inspection certificates to back the claim up. 

It seems to me to be pretty obvious that putting an insecticide into a colony of insects is a desperate measure. (Yes, I know mites are not insects, but close enough for poisoning purposes.) This survey has been a great comfort to me, because to hear the oldtimers tell it, my chance of complete failure is 100%, if I don't treat.

In fact, every beekeeper and prospective beekeeper should be studying this survey, because many of the practices that are recommended turn out to have insignificant effects on the survival of colonies. Terramycin? Doesn't help. Feeding protein supplements? Doesn't help, Feeding carbohydrates? Doesn't help. Thymol, screened bottom boards, drone removal? Don't help.

However, small beetle traps do work, and I have those in my hives, because here in warm sandy Florida, they are a huge problem. I don't worry too much about beetles developing a resistance to drowning in oil.

Anyway, I feel as though I've learned a lot from this thread, and thanks to the OP!


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## Luterra (Sep 7, 2011)

> In fact, every beekeeper and prospective beekeeper should be studying this survey, because many of the practices that are recommended turn out to have insignificant effects on the survival of colonies. Terramycin? Doesn't help. Feeding protein supplements? Doesn't help, Feeding carbohydrates? Doesn't help. Thymol, screened bottom boards, drone removal? Don't help.


That's a valid conclusion only for prophylactic treatments like fumagilin and terramycin. I'm not convinced they do much good, and the survey bears that out. As for "reactive" treatments like protein patties, syrup feeding, and mite treatments (assuming the beekeeper is treating based on counts rather than prophylactically), "no difference" is to be expected even if the treatments are 100% essential. Carbohydrates (sugar syrup) are fed to light hives in fall until they have adequate winter stores. Presumably those who didn't feed left enough honey for the bees. No difference observed, but I'm sure the light hives would have perished at a much higher rate had they not been fed. Same goes for mites. Most of those not treating have been treatment-free for some time and have adopted mite-resistant genetics and management practices, so losses are not especially high. I'm willing to bet that if all those who reported treating had simply skipped the treatment, their losses would have been in the 50-60% range. 

So...we have evidence that treatment-free is becoming a viable alternative to treating in terms of annual losses. But we can't take this as evidence that treatments don't work. Treatments work on bees that need them, just like feeding syrup improves winter survival of hives that are short on stores.

Mark


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## rhaldridge (Dec 17, 2012)

Luterra said:


> That's a valid conclusion only for prophylactic treatments like fumagilin and terramycin. I'm not convinced they do much good, and the survey bears that out. As for "reactive" treatments like protein patties, syrup feeding, and mite treatments (assuming the beekeeper is treating based on counts rather than prophylactically), "no difference" is to be expected even if the treatments are 100% essential. Carbohydrates (sugar syrup) are fed to light hives in fall until they have adequate winter stores. Presumably those who didn't feed left enough honey for the bees. No difference observed, but I'm sure the light hives would have perished at a much higher rate had they not been fed. Same goes for mites. Most of those not treating have been treatment-free for some time and have adopted mite-resistant genetics and management practices, so losses are not especially high. I'm willing to bet that if all those who reported treating had simply skipped the treatment, their losses would have been in the 50-60% range.
> 
> So...we have evidence that treatment-free is becoming a viable alternative to treating in terms of annual losses. But we can't take this as evidence that treatments don't work. Treatments work on bees that need them, just like feeding syrup improves winter survival of hives that are short on stores.
> 
> Mark


Good points. And history does bear this out; folks who decide to stop treatment often have higher losses than that.

I know of quite a few folks who feed pollen substitute and syrup routinely, not as a response to conditions. Michael Bush has some interesting material on this practice.

http://www.bushfarms.com/beesfeeding.htm

It would be very interesting to see a comparison of survival rates between those who leave adequate honey (and have a good enough season to do so) and those who have to feed syrup to get hives through the winter. It seems reasonable to assume the former would have better survival rates, but I'd be interested in numbers. There's a saying among some beekeepers that syrup is cheaper than honey, which I think can sometimes lead to taking too much honey and trying to get bees through the winter on fall-fed syrup. In general, I think it's safe to say that treatment free beekeepers are less likely to do this, as natural feeds are a part of the philosophy.

I know some Bond beekeepers refuse to feed, on the theory that having enough stores to overwinter in a particular location is a trait that can be selected for. I'm not that dedicated; I would feed rather than let a hive die because the conditions were so bad that even a great hive wouldn't have enough to get by.


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## Rick 1456 (Jun 22, 2010)

rhaldridge said:


> That's an interesting thought. Do you know of anyone who has treated and whose mites have become less virulent?


In the case of varroa that may not necessarily be true. The really odd thing about their reproductive habits is that as long as their populations remain low they continue to inbreed. It isn't until the populations get high enough for a colony to collapse and be robbed out that cross breeding of varroa occurs to any extent. It seems entirely believable to me that the longer you control your mite numbers the less virulent varroa will become.

My memory is terrible anymore. I seem to remember a study done that suggested (?) it is uncommon for an organism to parasitize it's host to its own end. The idea being, once a certain population of, or mite load is reached, the mites "back off" to some degree. If the bees can tolerate/deal with that level, they survive. A homeostasis of sorts is reached. If treatments/manipulations are done that reduce the mite populations, it triggers a "population explosion" of sorts. Pheromone based. Maybe someone will remember this study and can comment further. I thought it interesting and along the lines of the above quote. Really interesting and informative thread. I get lost in the numbers game but I get the just of it. Thanks
Rick


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## jim lyon (Feb 19, 2006)

rhaldridge said:


> That's an interesting thought. Do you know of anyone who has treated and whose mites have become less virulent?


I am not aware of any research either proving or disproving this. Its really just a hypothesis based on what we know about how varroa reproduce.


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## rhaldridge (Dec 17, 2012)

jim lyon said:


> I am not aware of any research either proving or disproving this. Its really just a hypothesis based on what we know about how varroa reproduce.


Well, rats. I was hoping you knew someone who treated and who had declining mite problems (not just as a temporary result of the treatment.) The theory seems plausible to me, but I guess the proof is in the pudding.

Jim, maybe you can answer a question. Do the majority of commercial beekeepers do mite counts and treat when the mites reach a certain threshold, or is it more common to take a prophylactic approach and just treat all hives on a schedule?


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## jim lyon (Feb 19, 2006)

rhaldridge said:


> Well, rats. I was hoping you knew someone who treated and who had declining mite problems (not just as a temporary result of the treatment.) The theory seems plausible to me, but I guess the proof is in the pudding.
> 
> Jim, maybe you can answer a question. Do the majority of commercial beekeepers do mite counts and treat when the mites reach a certain threshold, or is it more common to take a prophylactic approach and just treat all hives on a schedule?


I can really only speak about what we do. Despite the fact that there are now treatments that can be used with a honey crop on (MAQS and Hopguard). I still feel, though, that realistically for honey producers there are only two safe and effective mite treatment windows, spring and fall. We make a determination on what to do with all the hives, it's just not realistic to do it any other way. We have never chosen not to treat in the fall as that is always when levels are at their highest. A thymol treatment when the last honey supers are removed in late August through September followed by an oxalic dribble in October is all it has taken in recent years. A simple brood break in the spring is the only thing resembling a treatment that has been required in the spring in recent years but we make the determination of whether to retreat with oxalic in the spring through mite counts on a sampling of the hives about 3 weeks after the queen has been removed. In recent years the answer has been no and I expect the same result this year.


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## GregP (Apr 4, 2013)

I remember years ago, my grandfather used to melt menthol cough drops and mix them into sugar syrup and candy boards. That worked for quite awhile just fine until the CCD started really happening and we had to amp up the medication. We didn't do much more than just the menthol at the time (also used some terramycin), and it worked. So I'd say it's worth giving a shot at least. Not that cough drops are necessarily "Natural" but I'm following the "Can put it in my mouth" guidelines.


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## Roland (Dec 14, 2008)

I concur with Jim Lyons hypothesis in post 79, that keeping mite populations low encourages inbreeding. It works best when you do not have many neighbors with bees.

Crazy Roland


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## Acebird (Mar 17, 2011)

Roland said:


> I concur with Jim Lyons hypothesis in post 79,


At what mite fall would you expect the cross breeding to occur?


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## jim lyon (Feb 19, 2006)

Acebird said:


> At what mite fall would you expect the cross breeding to occur?


That's a good question Brian. It would seem to have to be a pretty high concentration, though, to get to the point where more than one female is vying for a single larvae.


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## Acebird (Mar 17, 2011)

jim lyon said:


> to get to the point where more than one female is vying for a single larvae.


:scratch: Isn't there always more than one female vying for a single larvae? The first egg is male and everything after that is female.
OK maybe now I get it. You are talking about multiple adults going into a cell which would produce multiple males in a cell. So I suppose you could cull some drones to see if they have multiple adults without youngens.


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## Michael Bush (Aug 2, 2002)

> but of the beekeepers I know, the only ones with healthy bees treat

Odd. I have the opposite experience.


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## Futhark Farm (Apr 15, 2013)

I'm new and very interested in the answers. My bees also arrive in late April. Good luck to you and may we both survive our first year ;-).


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