# Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?



## zhiv9 (Aug 3, 2012)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*

I would think it would also depend on strain/race. The darker strains that overwinter in smaller clusters are less likely to be "boiling out" in May, but could make up for that with rapid build up. I think its tough to compare without somehow trying equalize quality/quantity of forage, amount of store left at the end of winter etc. Maybe the only good way is compare yields per colony and overwintering success over several seasons.


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## JRG13 (May 11, 2012)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*

What zhiv says. How many frames of bees did he overwinter with compared to yours? Hives that overwinter strong get going quick. Feeding sub will help if you have the bees to raise the brood.


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## Charlie B (May 20, 2011)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*

As far as the feral bees go, I've caught some very strong colonies but I've also caught week ones. I think there's too many variables to compare. All I know is what I've seen as a result of treating some of my hives. Most of the hives I've treated last summer are all thriving and have produced a good crop of honey. Most of the hives I didn't treat are long gone.


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## gmcharlie (May 9, 2009)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*

I think it depends on you, and your goals... I have not seen wild hives boil with bees like well managed hives. there are a few super colonies out there, but by and large the treecutouts I get are not usualy much more than a real good single.
But back to my thought. 
Its up to you, if you want to keep bees and sell a few Like Soloman Parker, treatment free and such, or like many here make sure you feed them honey all winter. More power to you... But if your after honey production and makeing money on them (I would refer to as husbandry) then you feed up BEFORE the flows to maximize, you let weak colonies die, or split them up, and you feed sugars in the fall when you take resources......

Neither is wrong, but you can't compare the two on any real level. yes you can get some hives that will without any intervention keep up, and boil out. several here would swear its done constantly... but if you listen real close and study what these guys are doing, there discounting the dinks. splitting them up.. leaving them out of the big picture counts. the tell you about the ten fantastic 6 story hives, but don't mention the 20 that are struggling in singles...

Me, I try to balance the two, i TRY not to treat. but I don't consider a pollen patty or feed as treating. Last year into the drought, I had well over half my hives that had to have a mite treatment.. first time ever.......Working real hard not to need that again...
so as I mentioned... its up to you. some untreated hives will match, but as an average, they will lag behind the nectar flows, not in front of them.


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## Robbin (May 26, 2013)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*



Adam Foster Collins said:


> I've been comparing my treatment free progress with a good friend and fellow beekeeper who treats.
> 
> I was pretty discouraged this spring when his bees were "boiling out of their boxes" in May, while mine were struggling. Recently, I got to thinking about pollen sub, and feeding and whatnot. I've typically tried to feed only when the bees were short - and not short due to my harvesting. The feeding of pollen sub seems to be just a standard procedure for people who use it. A spring "boost". I fed a little of it myself this spring, as the bees were in rough shape and getting no help from the weather.
> 
> ...


I think it's the ultimate comparison, and you have someone nearby that you can physically lay eyes on. Nothing subjective, nothing lost in translation, nothing overstated. I really appreciate your honesty. Unless you simply don’t care what the difference is. I do. Primarily on bee mortality. I don’t raise bees to kill them. I’m not really in the money making business, but I would like my bees to break even for me on the money side. Comparing how many gallons of honey each hive produces is interesting and I want to know, but how many hives survive and how many hives you can grow into, by comparison, is very important information. Please keep up your thoughtful and interesting posts!:applause:


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## beemandan (Dec 5, 2005)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*

It would be hard, in my opinion, to compare your bees to someone else’s. Way too many variables.
Now….if you had two yards of your own, from a shared gene pool and knew exactly which care methods were applied to each yard, you’d be a lot closer to making a fair comparison.


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## Adam Foster Collins (Nov 4, 2009)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*



beemandan said:


> It would be hard, in my opinion, to compare your bees to someone else’s. Way too many variables.
> ...


Sure, I get that. But I think one tends to compare to some degree no matter what. It's kind of how you test your theories and approaches vs. others. And I think that's fine if your practices are similar. And that's the thrust of what I'm after. I think you _do_ compare, and that some degree of comparison is helpful - even necessary - to really understanding how you're doing.

But I'm just wondering if "thriving" and what "thriving" looks like is going to be the same for bees who aren't given as much "help".

It reminds me of when I started, and the way I evaluated a "good" queen. When you're a beginner, a "good queen" is basically one that is in there, alive and laying eggs. So right from the start, I figured I had "good queens", because that's what they were doing, and the bees were gentle, and there wasn't too many drones, and all was well. 

But I'll never forget the first time I pulled a brood frame from a _really_ prolific, strong egg-laying-machine-type queen. I was blown away. I couldn't believe there was so much capped brood on one frame. And in that instant, my understanding of "good" totally shifted. I had a new frame of reference to measure things by. And over time, that frame of reference continues to deepen. Now I think of how she reacts to changes in the environment, how much food they consume in winter, etc. "Good" means something different as you learn more about the total picture.

So I'm wondering if measuring my ideas of what a "thriving colony" is, should be measured against treatment free examples - and if a thriving treatment free might look different from a thriving treated colony. Does a deeper understanding of the total picture of working with bees without treatments make "thriving" look different?

I'm wondering if there is a place for a more specific sharing of info between treatment free beekeepers - creating a "bar" or "Standard" that is in line with a set of practices...

y'know?

Adam


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*

As to what is the natural size, the majority of wild hives I've seen are something around the size of one deep, some even smaller.

However bees are versatile, and give them a bigger box, they are quite capable of using it. A hive could be "big", ie, several boxes boiling with bees and this is still quite within what is natural to them.

To the other matter, in theory anyway, it is not reasonable to expect a non treated hive to do as well as a treated one. This is simply because an untreated hive has only these options. Die, struggle against mites and survive but barely, or deal with the mites and do well. But in a treated hive, dealing with the mites is taken care of, the bees do not have to expend energy on it, those resources can be spent on other things.

Of course the argument will come up that some treated hives die of mites anyway etc. But for our purposes we are talking about a hive where treatment is carried out effectively.

Each mite in a hive represents one bee that was raised with a mite family sucking on it through it's pupation. The bee, at a quick glance, may seem normal. But the research is that it will function poorly and die young. That is a cost to the hive, whether we notice it or not.


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## RiodeLobo (Oct 11, 2010)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*



Adam Foster Collins said:


> But I'll never forget the first time I pulled a brood frame from a _really_ prolific, strong egg-laying-machine-type queen. I was blown away. I couldn't believe there was so much capped brood on one frame. And in that instant, my understanding of "good" totally shifted.


Amen, I had the same experience (unless I just upgraded to mediocre from poor)


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## cg3 (Jan 16, 2011)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*

Rio- This years bees are better?


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## Adam Foster Collins (Nov 4, 2009)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*



Oldtimer said:


> ...give them a bigger box, they are quite capable of using it. A hive could be "big", ie, several boxes boiling with bees and this is still quite within what is natural to them...


Sure enough. I agree with that, and there is no getting around the fact that "keeping bees" usually means some human interference with what is "natural". It could mean hive locations relative to the ground, number of colonies in close proximity to each other, added ventilation for hives during hot weather, or simply adding or subtracting boxes to accommodate a growing or shrinking colony size. All of these things are "artificial", or man-made alterations, and are therefore not "natural" to the life of the bee. So it's always a question of degree when it comes to beekeeping in relation to what is natural. Varying degrees away from what they would be/do on their own. True.

So I guess I'm asking about comparisons between operations of similar degrees; similar amounts and kinds of alterations from natural. Treatment free is fewer degrees from natural than treating. And I'm not saying there's a "goodness" or "rightness" in "natural" either. I'm not judging here, just making the observation and noting it for what it is.



Oldtimer said:


> ...in theory anyway, it is not reasonable to expect a non treated hive to do as well as a treated one. ...


That is also what I suspect, and is the impetus for the thread. If it is not reasonable to expect a non-treated hive to do as "well" as a treated one, then is it reasonable to measure the success of not treating next to treating *after you've made the commitment to not treating? *

There's the catch. Because if you're trying to decide between treating or not, then you have to compare what the two models are likely to offer. You simply *have to* compare the two approaches, and their likely outcomes in order to choose. There's no getting around that. 

But once you *do* choose, and you choose to go without treatments, is there any point in comparing the two anymore beyond second-guessing your choice not to treat?

I ask, because I'm thinking that at that point - the point of being committed - you perhaps have entered into a different paradigm. You're in a different world where the cycles and markers and tasks are different. At that point, I wonder if comparing to a treated model only serves to confuse your feedback.

I go back to the model of the dairy cow.

I've got a cow without any hormone treatments, no artificial food; eating grass from the meadow and getting milked by hand. Can I really compare its "success level" to a typical "big operation" dairy cow, who's getting hormones, antibiotics a different variety of foods and milked by machine? Unless it's to compare in an effort to decide which one I want to take part in somehow? The first cow is likely going to produce way less, but if I've chosen to go that route, then I've accepted a different paradigm, and a different set of standards to what "successful" means. Again, I'm not saying one is "right" or "wrong" but they are distinctly different in terms of operations and outcomes.

Is that true of the treatment free approach to bees, or is that generally accepted in the conversations surrounding treatment free beekeeping here and in other discussion forums? *I don't think it is.* From what I'm seeing, the treatment free approach is constantly compared pretty directly to the treated. And I think it's because most of the discussion is focused on why one should choose one or the other. So the two are pitted head-to-head, and the reasons against generally amount to a list of ways the treatment free approach will not allow a person to get the same results, or meet the same standards for "thriving" that exists within that of the treated world.

Consider this passage from Kirk Webster's article, entitled "A Beekeeping Diary #3: Early Spring—Unpacking and Evaluating Colonies " He writes:

*"I’m afraid that even after what I would consider good results over winter, many beekeepers would not be very impressed if they came here in early April. There seem to be way too many empty spaces, and the clusters are very small. But now I know better than to spend any energy being discouraged—even if my losses are near 50%. "*

I think this is a very telling passage, from a very successful treatment-free beekeeper. To me, when I first read it, it helped me realize that keeping bees treatment free is its own world, with different standards - to a point. You still need to make your numbers to run a business or make it worth your while to do the work. But in getting there, the road can be quite different. 

The standards are unique to the method, and that means - once you've made the choice and committed to a method, you really only need to compare with others using similar methods - if you're going to compare at all.

I wonder if too many of us are spending more time defending the approach while trying make it match a standard it's not really capable of. 

It's like top bar hive users spending time arguing with people who are challenging the use of them, because they can't do what a langstroth does. If you're in the process of choosing a hive type to use, then great; that discussion is useful in weighing your options. 

But once you've chosen and are committed to using the top bar hive, then you've got a different set of things to think about, and a different set of standards to measure "success." At that point, the continuing dialogue about comparing the top bar to the lang is a waste of time, and often leads to tension between people that just aren't looking for the same things anyway. By default they cannot - and will not ever agree. They're in two paradigms; comparing apples to oranges.

I'm wondering how long it's going to take before the conversation norm within the treatment-free dialogue has nothing to do with treating, and no longer spends so much of the time defending the choice itself.

And focuses more time and creative energy truly comparing apples to apples...

Adam


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*

Agree good post.


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## squarepeg (Jul 9, 2010)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*

adam, i wonder if a three deep set up would give you a bigger winter cluster and faster build up in the spring?


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## cg3 (Jan 16, 2011)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*



squarepeg said:


> a three deep set up


With all the discussion about this, I've decided to go from 3 to 4 mediums.


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## Adam Foster Collins (Nov 4, 2009)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*

Who knows?

I'm working on wintering nucs, so that's an effort to find the smaller end of the envelope. I have one colony on three deeps now, so I could work toward going into winter with that one and see how it does.

Overall, my present effort is on as many colonies as I can manage on as little gear as possible. The 3Deep approach is a "maxi-gear" model. I am also an urban beekeeper, so storage and workshop space is at a premium...

Adam


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## Solomon Parker (Dec 21, 2002)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*



Adam Foster Collins said:


> All of that amounts to "assisted living" of one degree or another.


Yes, and that assisted living has effects and consequences, as you're noticing.




Adam Foster Collins said:


> Is it fair to ever expect bees to "boil out of their boxes" with no treatments, and minimal feeding?


If your bees are accustomed to boiling out at the correct time of the year, then yes, but I have rarely seen any feral or wild sort of bee boiling out in May, which for me is late spring, but for you is probably early spring. When bees don't have the unnatural benefit of feeds and treatments, they winter smaller, they are more efficient, in short, they do what it takes to survive and boiling out before the time comes is a huge gamble and can easily result in starvation if things don't pan out. That's not a good survival strategy.




Adam Foster Collins said:


> Is that state of "thriving" an "unnatural one", like the production of the modern dairy cow?


I haven't noticed any cows thriving lately either (I live next to a small time cow farmer and former dairyman). What I see is calves dying pretty regularly, diseases that need constant treatment, and that far corner of the field where he drags the carcasses to be cleaned by the vultures.




Adam Foster Collins said:


> Is the modern standard of "healthy colonies" for those treated and regularly fed unrealistic for those who are not?


The modern standard of health has precious little to do with health and much more to do with "what the bees look like right now." What the bees look like right now is really irrelevant in the overall scheme of things. The right question is, will they survive, produce honey, and be gentle enough to enjoy working with? I don't care what they look like right now.




Adam Foster Collins said:


> Do feral bees get as strong and produce as much as fed and treated bees?


No. 




Adam Foster Collins said:


> Are we comparing apples to apples? Or is the minimalist/treatment free bee a different animal?


Well, that depends, it's an animal that doesn't collapse if left alone. It's an animal that survives without inputs. It's an animal living in an environment much closer to that of a tree or hole in the ground with fewer chemicals in the comb, and it's an animal that dies like all animals do, not being expected to live forever, and not being allowed to become fit for its conditions.


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## squarepeg (Jul 9, 2010)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*



Adam Foster Collins said:


> Who knows?
> 
> I'm working on wintering nucs, so that's an effort to find the smaller end of the envelope. I have one colony on three deeps now, so I could work toward going into winter with that one and see how it does.
> 
> ...


understood adam. given those parameters and the fact that you are in the far north i think you have some ambitious goals. if you are able to achieve them you will have really done something worthwhile, i wish you success!


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## Michael Bush (Aug 2, 2002)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*

An awful lot of the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of feeding syrup or pollen to stimulate brood production is, depends on locality.

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

In my locality it often backfires. I can feed syrup and pollen early IF the weather cooperates and IF we don't get a late hard freeze, I could have hives boiling with bees by the 1st of May. The problem is they will swarm by the 7th of May and my flow isn't for another month.

On the other hand IF the weather does not cooperate enough that they can even take the syrup because it never warms up enough, it doesn't make much difference.

And then the other possibility is that it gets warm enough, you stimulate all that brood production and a late hard freeze locks them on that brood and they starve without moving off of it.

So the end result, in my locality is that it seldom works out well. I either end up with swarming a month before the flow, no change, or they die stuck on brood.

This may or may not be the case in some other climate, but I prefer bees in tune with my climate who know when to build up and hit the main flow.

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

I think it's significant how many of the great beekeepers of the past tried stimulative feeding and concluded it was a bad idea.

"The reader will by now have drawn the conclusion that stimulative feeding, apart from getting the foundations drawn out in the brood chamber, plays no part in our scheme of bee-keeping. This is in fact so." --Beekeeping at Buckfast Abbey, Brother Adam 

"Very many, at the present time, seem to think that brood rearing can be made to forge ahead much faster by feeding the bees a teacupful of thin sweet every day than by any other method; but from many experiments along this line during the past thirty years I can only think this a mistaken idea, based on theory rather than on a practical solution of the matter by taking a certain number of colonies in the same apiary, feeding half of them while the other half are left "rich" in stores, as above, but without feeding and then comparing "notes" regarding each half, thus determining which is the better to go into the honey harvest...results show that the "millions of honey at our house" plan followed by what is to come hereafter, will outstrip any of the heretofore known stimulating plans by far in the race for bees in time for the harvest." --A Year's work in an Out Apiary, G.M. Doolittle. 

"Probably the single most important step in management for achieving colony strength, and one most neglected by beekeepers, is to make sure the hives are heavy with stores in the fall, so that they emerge from overwintering already strong early in the spring" --The How-To-Do-It book of Beekeeping, Richard Taylor 

"The feeding of bees for stimulating brood-rearing in early spring is now looked upon by many as of doubtful value. Especially is this true in the Northern States, where weeks of warm weather are often followed by 'Freeze up.' The average beekeeper in the average locality will find it more satisfactory to feed liberally in the fall-- enough, at least so that there shall be sufficient stores until harvest. If the hives are well protected, and the bees well supplied with an abundance of sealed stores, natural brood rearing will proceed with sufficient rapidity, early in the spring without any artificial stimulus. The only time that spring feeding is advisable is where there is a dearth of nectar after the early spring flow and before the coming of the main harvest." --W.Z. Hutchinson, Advanced Bee Culture 

"While it is often advocated that stimulative feeding be resorted to early, in order to build the colonies up to a sufficient strength, the author inclines to the belief that colonies in two stories will build up just as rapidly if there is an abundance of sealed honey in the hive, as is possible with stimulative feeding. Sometimes it seems that uncapping a portion of the honey has a stimulating effect, but feeding in small quantities, for the purpose of stimulating the bees to greater activity, rarely seems necessary..."--Frank Pellett, Practical Queen Rearing


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## gmcharlie (May 9, 2009)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*

Michael, do you use the same thought process for pollen patties??


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## Adam Foster Collins (Nov 4, 2009)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*

So the picture really is one of a different paradigm. Treatment free beekeeping is a whole different animal, and what looks "good" for a treatment free apiary would likely not warrant the same description to a treated apiary.

Sol, I appreciate your taking the time to make your detailed response. 

Squarepeg, I'm actually living in zone 6a or 6b, so we don't spend a ton of our winters below 14F or so. "Far North" is still quite a ways North of here. As a whole, Nova Scotia is actually the warmest province in Canada. Maine and Vermont winters are much harder than ours, as we're out getting affected more by the Gulf Stream. We have real winter, but no harder than much of the middle US. So I may not be as ambitious as you think! 

Michael, I'm sorry I slid this thread into a discussion of feeding, as it really wasn't the thrust of what I wanted to talk about, but I appreciate your detailed response as well. Who knows what we're doing to our bees with all the feeding? Personally, I try to keep it to times when the bees will be in real danger of not surviving without it, such as when I've done a cut-out and have moved a colony late season and have caused damage and loss of stores in the process. 

At the end of the day, a minimalist approach will mean that the bees are more often left to rely on their own abilities. That may mean that they are not as strong in early spring, and it likely means a significantly smaller honey harvest for me in the Fall.

But like top bar hives, or mason bees - the reasons you go treatment free, or "natural", or "minimalist" are different than the reasons that one chooses to treat and feed and supplement. 

And I think that's what it comes down to. I'm into the bees. Just _the bees_. Sure I like honey and all, but the thing I'm most interested in is how I can work to foster the development of a bee that can live on her own here in Nova Scotia without treatments and without being fed and supplemented so much. If I can reach a sustainable apiary that can live with mites, and "thrive" in "minimal" care. Then that seems like a worthwhile thing to do - for me.

If I was interested in maximum honey production with minimum die-off due to mites, then I guess a treatment model might better serve me, and that would be the way to go.

It really comes down to what fits with your goals. And figuring out what your goals are is a big part of the curve.

Once you get past that, there's really not much point in arguing with people who just don't share your goals. 

And from what I can see, there is a huge difference between people who would _like to be_ treatment free, and people who _*are*_ treatment free.

They're on two different planets.

Adam


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## frazzledfozzle (May 26, 2010)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*

MY question is why do beekeepers decide to go treatment free? 

What is the reasoning behind it? 

Why would you rather let a hive die than treat? what does it accomplish in the scheme of things? obviously if you run a few hives treatment free you aren't going to be making any inroads to changing the local gene pool so on a district wide level you aren't going to be making any difference to anythiong or anyone just yourself.

So why forgo lots of honey and live bees for the sake of a treatment? whats the end game?

Obviously I'm asking the question to anyone rather than a specific person 

.


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## squarepeg (Jul 9, 2010)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*



Adam Foster Collins said:


> And from what I can see, there is a huge difference between people who would _like to be_ treatment free, and people who _*are*_ treatment free.
> 
> They're on two different planets.
> 
> Adam


if you say so adam. i personally don't favor either/or distinctions, as more often times it can be both/and, as would be the case with an ipm approach.

i do agree that what each of decides to do is based on our individual philosophy and goals.

you are fortunate in that having worked through the options you have arrived on a path you are comfortable with. 

i have enjoyed following your quest, thanks for sharing.


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## zhiv9 (Aug 3, 2012)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*



squarepeg said:


> i personally don't favor either/or distinctions, as more often times it can be both/and, as would be the case with an ipm approach.
> 
> i do agree that what each of decides to do is based on our individual philosophy and goals.


I think the partisanship is really unfortunate. On one side we have "treaters" some of which can't be content just to treat, but also feel the need to try to convince everyone else that this is the only way. On the other side we have the tf group. This can roughly divided into two groups:

1)Experienced beekeepers that have through hard work and experience, come up with some combination of bees and beekeeping methods that no longer require treatment. This seems to be the relative minority

2)Newbees that enter beekeeping thinking they are going to change the world, thumbing their noses at experienced beekeepers just because they treat.

There are exceptions of course.

I don't understand either point of view. "Treaters" can only benefit from the development of methods, bees, etc that help with disease and mite resistance. If nothing less it could help them to treat less and save money on treatments. Newbees need to learn to keep bees regardless of whether or not they treat. What better instructor than someone from your area with experience - even the do treat. Ignore their treatment advice if they treat, but learn as much as you can about local bee management.

I also encourage every new beekeeper to read "50 years among the bees" by CC Miller (http://www.soilandhealth.org/03sov/0302hsted/030208miller/030408miller.pdf). What I got from it is that other than mites, very little in beekeeping has changed in a 100 years. Your chances of doing nothing new and revolutionary are pretty slim.


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## Cloverdale (Mar 26, 2012)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*

Thanks or all that info, Michael Bush; I am reading you website now, and re- reading Bro. Adams book...does this way of thinking and in your experience, when should we use pollen patties? Or no?


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## Solomon Parker (Dec 21, 2002)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*



frazzledfozzle said:


> MY question is why do beekeepers decide to go treatment free?


For me, I got tired of the idea that I had to order stuff to keep my bees alive, so when I quickly discovered Dee Lusby in my initial research, I figured why would I want to do it any other way?





frazzledfozzle said:


> What is the reasoning behind it?


The reasoning is that bees should be able to handle disease themselves through natural selection. Back in the day, we used to hear the saying trotted out "they don't make wolf resistant sheep." But the truth is, "they" (nature) do. "They" (humans) don't. Humans make tasty fat wooly sheep. Nature makes sheep that climb cliffs and have big nasty horns, wolf resistant sheep. But bees are not mammals and obviously don't do well when factory farmed in the face of a pest which by its nature requires adaptation. Adaptation requires selection, selection requires pressure, and for there to be proper pressure, treatments must be abandoned.





frazzledfozzle said:


> Why would you rather let a hive die than treat?


Many reasons, chief of which, it takes money and time to treat. Dying is free. Secondly, treating retards adaptation. Third, treating requires further treating, it's not like the flu. Fourth, treating is barely more effective than not treating in my reckoning. Fifth, why would I treat when my losses are lower than the treaters?





frazzledfozzle said:


> what does it accomplish in the scheme of things?


It accomplishes bees that can survive on their own and which don't require treatments. It's also much more fun as far as I'm concerned, knowing that I'm accomplishing something that others cannot or choose not to. It's more fun to me to build something rather than buy it whole.





frazzledfozzle said:


> obviously if you run a few hives treatment free you aren't going to be making any inroads to changing the local gene pool so on a district wide level you aren't going to be making any difference to anythiong or anyone just yourself.


I haven't found that to be the case. My bees are in tune with and related to the feral population. They are adapted to this climate and do quite well, rarely being caught off guard by weather conditions and needing help.





frazzledfozzle said:


> So why forgo lots of honey and live bees for the sake of a treatment?


I have also not found this to be the case. My per hive harvest is not largely different from the local average, and I certainly bring in more honey than any of my beekeeping friends.




frazzledfozzle said:


> whats the end game?


The end game is an enjoyable lifelong beekeeping experience absent extra work and fear that my bees will die if I step away for a couple months.


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## D Semple (Jun 18, 2010)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*



frazzledfozzle said:


> MY question is why do beekeepers decide to go treatment free?
> 
> 
> 
> .


In my case all my bees are caught bees from feral sources. Doesn't make sense to me to take bees that are existing on their own and subject them to treating and artificial feeding.

I have no problem with how anybody else chooses to manage their bees and in fact greatly admire the commercial guys.

Don


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## gmcharlie (May 9, 2009)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*

I think (JMO) most make up there mind based on who got them started........


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## JWChesnut (Jul 31, 2013)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*

From my perspective, there is an enormous portmanteau of poorly understood Darwinian adaptation being promulgated by strident advocates. Adaptation is a conservative process. Adaptation of a species doesn't occur in your backyard in two years. 

The core evolutionary strategy of honeybees is to *not* change. This forces flowers to evolve toward the bee, and parasites to evolve toward lower virulence. Bees have a promiscuous, obligate out-crossing mechanism. Within the super-organism of the hive, they have high variation (which makes them resilient and that raises "fitness"). The variation means the daughter queens are all unlike, and the workers raised by the daughters are all unlike (and these workers only have 1/4 of the queen mother's genes in a thoroughly resorted hodge-podge). 

High variation means the colony super-organism has a worker for every situation (think immune reactions), but it also means that every generation thoroughly reshuffles the deck. The bees have a mechanism to keep returning to the central tendency, rather than drifting to new and untried evolutionary dead ends. The core "intelligence" of the bee's evolutionary approach is to stay the same, and force the world of flowers and parasites to adapt to itself. This is not true of many insects that speciate at the drop of a hat. Bees abandoned reproductive potential of the "workers" to avoid each female starting its own lineage. It abandoned single mating in favor of a promiscuous system to ensure maximum variability. It evolved a self-incompatible mating to prevent homozygous crossses. It evolved a drone-congregation mating pattern to ensure crossing.

Organisms with bee-like breeding systems speciate when isolated with a "founder effect". The local race on the island of Cyprus would be an example, and the intensively studied Iberian race generated from the few North African bees that crossed the straights of Gibralta at the end of the ice-age. 

Against the solid inertia of bees to *not change*, humans wanting shift their genotype need to employ human intelligence. This means they must employ directed selection to overcome the barrier the bees have erected. The bees are fundamentally conservative and are not going shift lineage in an unbounded out-crossing population.

I think some of the treatment-free keepers are making solid selections. Perhaps their local situation are such that they have isolation that permits new races to "fix". M. Bush's local landscape seems almost devoid of bee-habitat save some isolated woodlots, so independent islets of adaptation are possible. The desert keepers benefit from an oasis effect that localizes habitat in widely spaced islands. I have gone looking for naturally isolated populations in my landscape. The Baton Rouge out-yard is on an isolated barrier island. Once a lineage is "founded", a key breeding requirement is to backcross sufficiently to prevent "inbreeding depression". Again, this requires direction, intelligence and selection-- as the natural tendency is to overshoot and return the species norm.

In order to direct selection, one needs a measure of a traits expression. The finer the measure (and genotyping is now possible and practiced) the more efficient the breeding progress. The advocates of a "live-and-let-die" approach are using the most wasteful and inefficient approach conceivable. If I understand them, they believe their is a integration of traits expressed by a colony, and this integration is selected for. Return to what we know of bee genetics: the workers are half-sisters of 15-30 fathers. The colonies founded by a worker egg promoted to become a queen is some wild resortment of some the queens genes and any one of 30 fathers. The grand-daughters of a queen (the hygenic workers of a new colony) are half-half-granddaughters of each other. 

You could breed the perfect queen (and Randy Oliver has an instructive annecdote about a Glenn Hygenic-Russian hybrid) but without an objective measure of the trait you are seeking you cannot isolate and reproduce the lineage, the perfect genes will sink back into the general genotype.

The "live-and-let-die" breeders (to the extent they have isolation and are able to generate a founder genotype) are selecting for a very coarse survival strategy-- rapid colony division. Evolution is lazy. If a genotype can promulgate itself with a fast-and-dirty approach, it will do so over a complex one (the principle of entropy applies to biological systems as well as physical). A genotype that constantly establishes new colonies to replace the ones lost to parasites will triumph. I have nothing against swarm catching per se, but one needs to recognize the "selection" one is making -- you are selecting for swarming.


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## beedeetee (Nov 27, 2004)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*



Solomon Parker said:


> Fifth, why would I treat when my losses are lower than the treaters?


I hear this a lot on Beesource. I know that if you look at the bottom line on the Beeinformed statistics that you can make that argument. But I think that it's more complicated than that. 

I'm not sure that I have ever lost many hives that I have treated. The ones that I have were dropping a couple hundred mites per day when the treatments started. I treated too late to save them. I'm just a hobbiest that has kept between 3 and 40 hives. I have 37 now. Losing 10-15% is really comfortable for me because it gives me room to put bees to stop swarming nest spring. Losing 30% just means I can't sell bees(but honestly it's kind of a hassle for me). Beyond 30% would be more difficult.

Why do some people treat and lost 30%? Well for me it's because I don't treat everything. Anything that has had any brood break doesn't get treated. Any first year nuc or hive doesn't get treated. Probably some should. But see above as to why I don't care.

I suspect also that the Beeinformed 30% are many commercial hives that have different stresses than my hobbiest hives that I can make sure have good queens, have enough food and don't ride on semi's for hours or days. It's just a different management style. 

I know that Michael Bush has stated that he treated and still lost all of his hives. I honestly don't understand that except that it must be a location issue. Like I said in the beginning, I'm not sure I've lost a hive that was treated on time.

I can say that I lost every hive every year back in the early 1990's when I didn't treat.

But I think that treatment free beekeepers should be encouraged. I just think that saying that you will lose the same number of hives if you treat as you will when you don't treat is not true. And I think that this is one of the better thread ever on Beesource. Some years I don't treat at all. On years that I do it's probably less than half. I suspect that as the years go on it will be less and less as I can handle the losses and hopefully the bees get better or the surviving mites get less virulent.


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## D Semple (Jun 18, 2010)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*



JWChesnut said:


> The variation means the daughter queens are all unlike, and the workers raised by the daughters are all unlike (and these workers only have 1/4 of the queen mother's genes in a thoroughly resorted hodge-podge).
> 
> Return to what we know of bee genetics: the workers are half-sisters of 15-30 fathers. The colonies founded by a worker egg promoted to become a queen is some wild resortment of some the queens genes and any one of 30 fathers. The grand-daughters of a queen (the hygenic workers of a new colony) are half-half-granddaughters of each other. .


Hence why I feel all the arguing, chest beating, my way is better than your way banter is all irrelevant. All the selection work being done by the most selective breeders won't last even 2 generations unsupported.




JWChesnut said:


> The "live-and-let-die" breeders (to the extent they have isolation and are able to generate a founder genotype) are selecting for a very coarse survival strategy-- rapid colony division. I have nothing against swarm catching per se, but one needs to recognize the "selection" one is making -- you are selecting for swarming.


and bees that shut down brood rearing during dearths, have smaller winter clusters, are thriftier, winter hardier, respond quicker to local forage flows, etc, etc. 

Epigenetics explains it, all the survival genes are already present just a matter of do we like the bee nature provides?

Great post JW

Thanks. ....Don


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## Michael Bush (Aug 2, 2002)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*

>Michael, do you use the same thought process for pollen patties??

In the spring there is pollen when there should be pollen. Before that IF I stimulate them to raise brood it's probably too early.

In the fall, if there is no pollen, I have a problem because I need long lived bees for winter. Unfortunately pollen SUBSTITUTE makes short lived bees. So sometimes I feed pollen in the open in a pollen dearth in the fall. Otherwise I don't. The bees usually trigger me to by gathering sawdust, grain dust and coffee grounds.

>MY question is why do beekeepers decide to go treatment free?
What is the reasoning behind it?

I have about 700 pages worth of info on that... but these two links (and I've included some of the relevant text) should be enlightning if you are honestly looking for enlightenment on the subject.

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

I don't know what all the rest of you have experienced, but with no treatments (on large cell size) I lost all my bees whenever I wouldn't treat for a couple of years. But finally I lost them even after treating with Apistan. It was obvious that the mites had built resistance. I've heard of big outfits losing their entire operation WHILE treating with Apistan or CheckMite. So we have reached the point where whether you treat or not, they all die anyway quite often. I think the problem here comes down to us not wanting to "do nothing". We want to attack the problem and so we do whatever the experts tell us because we are desperate. But what they are telling us is failing anyway. Once I lost them all AFTER I treated them, I could no longer see any reason to treat them. Treating only perpetuates the problem. It breeds bees that can't survive whatever you are treating for, contaminates the comb and upsets the whole balance of the hive.
Ecology of the hive

There is no way to maintain the complex ecology of a natural beehive while dumping in poisons and antibiotics. The beehive is a web of micro and macro life. There are more than 170 kinds of benign or beneficial mites, as many or more kinds of insects, 8,000 or more benign or beneficial microorganisms that have been identified so far, some of which we know the bees cannot live without and some of which we suspect keep other pathogens in balance. Every treatment we dump in a hive, from essential oils that interfere with the bees smell (which is how everything in the dark of the hive is communicated) and kill microorganisms (beneficial and otherwise); to organic acids which kill microorganisms as well as many insects and benign mites to acaracides (which are always just things that kill arthropods which include insects and mites but kill mites at a slightly higher rate); to antibiotics which kill the microflora most of which is either beneficial or benign but useful in maintaining the balance and crowding out pathogens; even to sugar syrup which has a pH that is detrimental to the success of many of the beneficial organisms and advantageous to many of the pathogens (EHB, AFB, Chalkbrood, Nosema etc.) unlike the pH of honey that is much lower and detrimental to the pathogens and hospitable to many known beneficial organisms. I think we've reached the point that it's silly to act like we've been doing any good when the bees are collapsing in spite of, if not because of all of this.
Downside of not treating

So what is the downside of not treating? Worst case is they die. They seem to be doing that regularly enough already aren't they? I don't see that I'm contributing to that by giving them the chance to reestablish a naturally sustainable system. I'm just not destroying that system arbitrarily to get rid of one thing with no regard to the balance of the system. Of the people I know who are not treating for anything even on large cell, their losses are less than those who are treating. On small cell or natural cell they are even less. But even if you don't buy the cell size debate, not treating is working as well as treating is. I go to bee meetings all over the country and hear people who, like me, lost their bees when they were treating religiously and then decided to just stop. Their new bees are now doing better than when they were treating them. I feel bad when I see a dead hive, but I also say "good riddance" to the genetics that couldn't make it.

If you think you'll have too many losses (my guess is you already do have too many losses) and you can't take those losses, what would it take to make splits and overwinter nucs to make up those losses every spring with your own locally adapted stock? A bunch of walk away splits made in the middle of July (after cashing in on the main flow) will usually winter, at least around here, and not put a dent in your honey crop. You can also split the mediocre hives earlier since they weren't doing much anyway and not really affect your honey crop You can also do cut down splits on the strong hives right before the main flow and get good splits, well fed queens, more honey AND more hives.
Upside of not treating

What is the upside of not treating? You don't have to buy the treatments. You don't have to drive to the yard and put the treatments in and drive to the yard to take them out. You don't have to contaminate your wax. You don't upset the natural balance by killing off micro and macro organisms that you weren't targeting but who are killed by the treatments anyway. That would seem like upside enough, but you also give the ecosystem of the bee hive a chance to find some natural balance again.

But the most obvious up side is that until you quit treating you can't breed for survival against whatever your issues are. As long as you treat you prop up weak genetics and you can't tell what weaknesses they have. As long as you treat you keep breeding weak bees and super mites. The sooner you stop, the sooner you start breeding mites adapted to their host and bees who can survive with them.

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

What can we do to have a sustainable beekeeping system?

Stop treating

The only way to have a sustainable system of beekeeping is to stop treating. Treating is a death spiral that is now collapsing. To leverage this, though you really need to raise your own queens from local surviving bees. Only then can you get bees who genetically can survive and parasites that are in tune with their host. As long as we treat we get weaker bees who can only survive if we treat, and stronger parasites who can only survive if they breed fast enough to keep up with our treatments. No stable relationship can develop until we stop treating.


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## BernhardHeuvel (Mar 13, 2013)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*

Repeating stuff all over again doesn't make it more true. I followed your advice and my bees wrecked. Thank you.


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## Andrew Dewey (Aug 23, 2005)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*



BernhardHeuvel said:


> Repeating stuff all over again doesn't make it more true. I followed your advice and my bees wrecked. Thank you.


Sorry but I have no idea what you are talking about or if you comment is targeted to a particular individual.

I was in a starved out first year colony yesterday (not one of mine). Being in tune with the weather and what is happening in the colony and what plants are blooming and do the bees get nectar or pollen from them is a skill developed over time and not something that can be bestowed.

Bees are all over Golden Rod here today collecting pollen. The colony I was in yesterday had no stores of any sort. I will check my nucs and late swarms this afternoon for stores, and am prepared to feed if I think prudent.


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## Michael Bush (Aug 2, 2002)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*

>I followed your advice and my bees wrecked. 

I'm not sure exactly what you experienced. I assume "wrecked" means they died. No matter what you do some of them die. Some harsh winters a lot of them die. Did you try to figure out WHY they died? 

Look for dead Varroa mites. Look for how the cluster is positioned and where stores are? Bees often starve with food just out of reach. Sometimes they starve because the hive is empty of stores. Queens from warm climates don't usually lead to colonies that winter well in cold climates. When they die from Varroa there are tens of thousands of Varroa on the bottom along with white specks (Varroa feces) in the brood cells. Other things to look for are "K" wings and deformed wings. "K" wings are usually an indication of Tracheal mites. Deformed wings are usually a sign of DVW which is usually spread more by Varroa. 

They also need to go into winter with young bees. Typically they raise these in the fall. A fall dearth can interfere with this and leave you with short-lived bees that may not make it to spring. Feeding pollen in the fall is probably a waste in a good year, but may save a hive in a year with a fall dearth. 

They need to go into winter with an appropriate sized cluster. This will vary by race and climate, but it takes a certain number of bees to make it to spring. A late swarm, a late split, a fall dearth etc. can lead to having a small cluster and they don't usually winter well without some help.

I think it's important to try to figure out what caused your losses in order to plan for the future.


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## RiodeLobo (Oct 11, 2010)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*



Adam Foster Collins said:


> Are we comparing apples to apples? Or is the minimalist/treatment free bee a different animal?
> Adam


The best analogy I can come up with is archery. I see treatment free beekeeping as traditional archery with a long bow and treated beekeeping as modern archery with a compound bow. Both will work, but there are certainly advantage and disadvantages between them. They are both basically the same endeavor, but with different tools, skill sets and limitations. That being said I think a straight comparison is unreasonable.

My experience with treatment free beekeeping has not been successful, with a 7/8 crash last winter. I am still plodding along and intend to keep at it.


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## Rusty Hills Farm (Mar 24, 2010)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*



JWChesnut said:


> From my perspective, there is an enormous portmanteau of poorly understood Darwinian adaptation being promulgated by strident advocates. Adaptation is a conservative process. *Adaptation of a species doesn't occur in your backyard in two years. *
> 
> The core evolutionary strategy of honeybees is to *not* change. This forces flowers to evolve toward the bee, and parasites to evolve toward lower virulence. Bees have a promiscuous, obligate out-crossing mechanism. Within the super-organism of the hive, they have high variation (which makes them resilient and that raises "fitness"). The variation means the daughter queens are all unlike, and the workers raised by the daughters are all unlike (and these workers only have 1/4 of the queen mother's genes in a thoroughly resorted hodge-podge).
> 
> ...


At the risk of setting off yet another war of words, I have to say that to me this is a really important post that has made me reevaluate my own position. 



> *Adaptation of a species doesn't occur in your backyard in two years. *


You seem to be saying that since the bees "reshuffle the deck" then all our requeening with VSH, etc will not have a lasting impact on all bees in general. If that is true, that's very freeing for the individual beekeeper. It means we can breed for what we want in our own bees without affecting the rest of the species and when we are gone, the ones we bred will basically revert. Yay. It also means, to me at least, that requeening is as much a treatment as using MAQS or fogging, and just as temporary. Maybe it's just me, but I don't see that as such a bad thing. It also suggests to me that we don't have to sit on our hands and watch our bees die if we don't want to. That treating them is no more harmful to the species than not treating them! In the end they will still revert to their old breeding model because that model doesn't get changed in a year or 3 of backyard breeding. Goody! Now I can breed the bees I want and keep them the way that gives me the most satisfaction, all the while knowing that I am not doing the species any permanent damage. When I'm gone, they'll just go back to their old model and keep right on doing what they've been doing for thousands of years.

That really IS freeing. I was starting to feel guilty for wanting to help my bees stay healthy and productive, for actually wanting a quality of life for them, and for interfering instead of just coldly letting them die. 

Thanks for posting this.

JMO

Rusty


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## squarepeg (Jul 9, 2010)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*

excellent post jwc, and it reinforces what dr. delaplane has to say here:

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


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## Adam Foster Collins (Nov 4, 2009)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*



squarepeg said:


> if you say so adam. i personally don't favor either/or distinctions, as more often times it can be both/and, as would be the case with an ipm approach.


Squarepeg, I'm glad you're a part of the conversation. A value as always.

I can absolutely see how a person could feel "in the middle" with an IPM approach. I was doing some of that myself for a while, but have come to believe that IPM still falls on the "planet" of treating. Not to suggest that as a "bad word" - truly. I really think making "bad" or "good" is really detrimental to our conversations and progress as a group of people who all share a common love of bees.

But IPM is still a consistent intervention which removes or disables the mites in ways the bees could never do on their own. And that's why I put it in the "Treating" paradigm. There's nothing wrong with that, and I completely understand the reasons for doing it. But in taking that approach, you can still expect to see results similar to other forms of artificial mite removal. 

A lot of what I'm suggesting, is that once you let go of all of the methods of fighting mites, the picture of "success" can look a lot different than what you'd expect when you're helping the bees deal with mites.

Adam


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## Adam Foster Collins (Nov 4, 2009)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*



BernhardHeuvel said:


> Repeating stuff all over again doesn't make it more true. I followed your advice and my bees wrecked. Thank you.


With all due respect, thank yourself.

You looked out into the world, and found that the advice someone offered resonated with your values and beliefs to a point where you chose to follow it, and perhaps it didn't work out as well as you'd hoped. But there could be a great number of reasons why.

I recently chose to follow the advice of a beekeeping friend about putting the queen in a hairclip queen cage during manipulations. I caged the queen and when I was ready to release her, found her stung through the "bars" by a worker.

My first reaction was to blame that "stupid" advice. But my friend had only known success with his methods, which is why he chose to share them. He would never offer me "bad" advice. It just didn't work well for me. Could have been an error I made, or dumb luck - or six million other things. There aren't many people going through the trouble of sharing their experiences unless they have found it to be useful and successful in their own experience.

Nobody's advice gets to your bees without you having the final say...

Empower yourself, and remember that it all comes down to you, your bees, and the natural cycles of weather and earth around you. 

The most important two words in your post?

"...I followed..."

Adam


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## Adam Foster Collins (Nov 4, 2009)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*



D Semple said:


> ..All the selection work being done by the most selective breeders won't last even 2 generations unsupported.


Will it? I'm glad you brought this up Don, because I have been thinking about this.

I wonder how much genetic work over the years has really become so "normal" that we don't even appreciate it anymore. For instance, we often talk about selecting for "gentleness" "lower tendency to swarm" and "production".

These are things that people have been selecting for for 200 years (or more). And if I think about it, I've got to wonder if it's something I really need to worry about so much. I have NEVER seen a hot hive. Never. The ones you read about that go after a guy and chase him 100 yards to his truck? Never seen it. I have also never seen a hive that swarmed a ton. Never. I've seen plenty of variation in production, but I've seen as much in weather too...

Now this is not to say that these "bad" colonies are not out there - but I suggest that they are very much in the minority. And when you read Brother Adam's account of traveling the world to investigate different bee races, you quickly learn that there are some pretty nasty, swarmy bees out there.

All that to say, that I feel that all the breeding and selection has given us a pretty range of bees to work with, and two generations doesn't lose an ounce of it.

So if enough of us put our noses to it, I feel pretty confident we could get to a place where mite resistance was every bit as "normal" to our bees as the traits we have come to expect in our bees to this point.



D Semple said:


> Great post JW


Agreed. I also enjoyed JWChestnut's detailed post.


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## Adam Foster Collins (Nov 4, 2009)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*



Rusty Hills Farm said:


> ...requeening is as much a treatment as using MAQS or fogging, and just as temporary. Maybe it's just me, but I don't see that as such a bad thing. It also suggests to me that we don't have to sit on our hands and watch our bees die if we don't want to. That treating them is no more harmful to the species than not treating them!


You know what, Rusty. I totally feel you on this. I want to reiterate, that I am absolutely NOT into the "good-guy/bad-guy" thing, and I do not buy into the "natural beekeeping" rhetoric.

I'm going the treatment free route (and this answers frazzledozzle's earlier question as well) simply because I have to admit *I do not know that much about the true nature and complexity of the honeybee.* I'm simply taking the minimalist route - trying to minimize how many things I do with the bees that they wouldn't do on their own if I left them alone - because *I just have no idea of the true scope of what anything I do is going to cause.* It's as simple as that for me.

Mike Bush says somewhere on his site, something like "If you don't know what to do, better to do nothing." I think that rings true for me.

If I give them essential oils that kill off a bunch of the microbes in their gut - what does that do? How does that make them feel? Does it hurt anything? It may help with mites, but does it hurt something I can't see? I just don't know - so I don't do it. It's the same for brood comb spacing, cell size, entrance size, whatever I can leave alone, I do that.

It's kind of a "keep it simple, stupid" approach, as in the grand scheme of things - I have to admit - I really don't know that much about what effect my actions will have on the bees. In a sense, I guess I'm "stupid". *But I have researched a lot of bee-related issues long and hard, and I find that for every smart person who says one thing, there is an equally smart person who says the opposite.* That tells me that we just don't have clear answers, so I just don't know what to do - so I try to "do nothing" as much as possible.

Now, I also realize that one can't really "keep" bees without some degree of manipulation. For instance, bees would "choose" to live in just a single deep's worth of space, and swarm a couple of times per year. I give them an expanding space - and I take some of their honey - and I feed them if they are dangerously light. So I do make choices on where I will interfere - just as anyone does.

This is not about right or wrong. It's about each of us doing our best to find a path that works to our own way of thinking.

I'm glad you're doing what you're doing, and sharing what you discover along the way, so the rest of us might learn a thing or two from you.

Adam


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## Hazel-Rah (May 12, 2013)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*

Great thread, and a lot of productive conversation going on. It seems clear to me Adam Foster Collins, that you are quite settled in your path and place in the practice if bees. It's all about your goals... If you want to steward, observe and cultivate the natural vitality of honeybees, your approach is going to be very different from someone who is using their bees to capitalize and stay in business. Which is going to be different then someone who has one pet hive. My service is toward the archetype of the honeybee. Not any individual queen or bee... or my rent.

Personally I'm interested in queen rearing and medicinal hive products. For me, treatment-free is a natural and obvious choice. There have already been many wise and extensive comments made by keepers far more experienced then myself, for that I am glad.


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## Adam Foster Collins (Nov 4, 2009)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*



Hazel-Rah said:


> ...It seems clear to me Adam Foster Collins, that you are quite settled in your path and place in the practice...


I'm only recently getting to feel that way, and I reserve the right to change directions if I find this one to bring me sadness! 

But that's really the gist of it. Each path offers a different set of likely or possible results, and each has it's value, as it offers another set of lessons. If the experiences we each have are shared, (as they are here) then we can all benefit from both the roads we take - and from the roads taken by others.

The treatment free road has it's own curves, hills and bumps. And I'm beginning to get a sense of how this ride is likely to go. That is helping me to commit to riding it out.

Adam


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## Hazel-Rah (May 12, 2013)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*

I was also thinking about your cow metaphor from a therapeutic perspective. Industrial diary cows are prolific producers, a true testament to human genetic manipulation. They are propped up through intensive chemical management and are dead at 4... 5? 

There is some esoteric conversation about forsaking the quality of the proteins, minerals, electrolytes and benefical micro-isms (of a raw, untreated stock that produces high quality product) for the volume of a less intensely 'vital' product. I can not through chemical manipulation, help the bees produce the herbal apothecary they do inside the hive. Genetics, forage and seasonal/regional sensibilities, and the sun- do that.


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## Solomon Parker (Dec 21, 2002)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*

Let me address the idea of selection, adaptation, and evolution.

I am not suggesting that wholesale macro-evolution is taking place in a group of hives in just a couple years. That would be ludicrous an most levels. What I am suggesting when I speak to adaptation is the rather rapid elimination of mixtures of traits which do not lead to survival, thereby meaning the concentration of mixtures traits which do lead to survival.

For instance, in the last several years, several of my few losses have been hives which produce what I would call excessive propolis, leaving me with hives which do not produce excessive propolis. 

Was I breeding against propolis production? No.
Is propolis production a negative trait? No.
Are all your hives that produce a lot of propolis going to die? No.

Why did these hives die? They had some mixture of traits which was not advantageous to survival in their present conditions. Maybe propolis production was part of that, maybe it was incidental. That's how it goes.

I repeatedly stress that it is a mixture of traits in discussions mentioning VSH. VSH is good, but it is not the only thing and with the proper mixture of traits, it isn't even necessary. That's why I am not concerned with my genetics being diluted by local commercial operations, or anyone else's local commercial operations. Those commercial bees have all sorts of things working against them beside DNA which require them to be treated to survive. If they do affect my hives negatively enough, then they fail to thrive and are replaced or die. It is a continual process, but I haven't seen it happen wholesale. Part of that is surely resulting from my continual replacement of the relatively few number of poorly performing queens, and the deaths of the few hives that I lose in the winter. It's beneficial.

For adaptation and evolution to take place, unfit animals need to die before reproducing. Selective breeding modifies that approach, maybe enhancing or speeding it up, maybe subverting and slowing it down, it depends on the breeder. One thing bred out of domesticated animals is the ability and desire to fight back. They are bred big and fat so they don't run or climb or fly well, and I can't really say they've gotten any smarter. In many cases, such as with turkeys, some cows and sheep, they cannot even reproduce without human intervention. I say that's too far and it can't be done with bees. At least throughout the history of domesticated animal breeding, some disease resistance was maintained due to the lack of medications. Such is not the case today.

Another trait often mentioned is breaking the brood cycle. Again this is a good trait, but with the proper mixture of traits, it is not necessary. Any individual trait is not necessary as long as the group accomplishes the necessity of survival and my goals of gentleness and production. I personally do not have a group of bees which swarms a lot or needs brood breaks to beat mites, that doesn't mean other people don't. Sam Comfort certainly keeps some bees (depending on location, Hawaii for instance) which do swarm a lot, but also make a lot of honey. That's one trait, beneficial, yes, but not required with the right mixture.

To recap: There's no evolution going on in this short of a time frame. It is a simple winnowing of traits, favoring a mixture of traits which results in survival. It's all about the right mixture. Since we do not yet know what all the traits are, it's best to leave it to the bees to figure it out (figuratively) on their own. The only way for that to happen is through the Bond Test. Any other interference results in frustration of the process and why I don't see many successful slow road treatment-free beekeepers, if any. They just can't get out of their own way because they think they're helping and they're simply interfering.


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## gmcharlie (May 9, 2009)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*

Nice to see actual polite discussion instead of the usual distain.
I would like to point out one small problem. there have been 2 comments on the genetics of cattle and breeding. both are hogwash. Dairy cattle average production is 11 years, up from the typical 7 of when I was kid on the DAIRY FARM. beef cattle are not dying off in droves either. If you have calf problems, its farmer issues, not cattle. the average beeve is denser and more productive and tastier than ever before due to animail husbandry......


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## Michael Bush (Aug 2, 2002)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*

>To recap: There's no evolution going on in this short of a time frame. It is a simple winnowing of traits, favoring a mixture of traits which results in survival. It's all about the right mixture. 

Exactly. Everyone acts like selective breeding is evolution. It is not. No new traits are going to miraculously show up. You have to have them already. But the bees DO have them already. Feral bees are surviving. That is the gene pool that has already taken the losses and is already a reasonably stable gene pool as opposed to trying to maintain some recessive trait that requires a lot of control over the genetics.


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## Solomon Parker (Dec 21, 2002)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*



gmcharlie said:


> If you have calf problems, its farmer issues, not cattle.


That's correct, the cows are not fit enough to survive and thrive without inputs from the farmer, treatments and assistance in birthing. That's why the cows I mentioned are dying. In the same case with the bees, why is the farmer's input necessary?


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## gmcharlie (May 9, 2009)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*

Solomon... your makeing things up.... Calf survival is higher than its ever been..... If you knew anything about cattle you would realize that Calf losses will break you. 10% loss and you will be bankrupt in one generation. 
Stick to things you know.


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## Solomon Parker (Dec 21, 2002)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*

Withdrawn.


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## zhiv9 (Aug 3, 2012)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*



Solomon Parker said:


> To recap: There's no evolution going on in this short of a time frame. It is a simple winnowing of traits, favoring a mixture of traits which results in survival. It's all about the right mixture. Since we do not yet know what all the traits are, it's best to leave it to the bees to figure it out (figuratively) on their own. The only way for that to happen is through the Bond Test. Any other interference results in frustration of the process and why I don't see many successful slow road treatment-free beekeepers, if any. They just can't get out of their own way because they think they're helping and they're simply interfering.


Based on your described experiences and proximity to other beekeepers, can you see any reason why a larger operation couldn't have similar results with a single 30 hive yard? Requeen with resistant or TF stock, regress to small cell and stop treating. Build back up from survivors and use those to breed queens for the rest of their hives. Assuming 300 hive operation and an initial loss of 70%, it would mean the difference between losing 21 hives and losing 210 hives.


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## Solomon Parker (Dec 21, 2002)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*

Adam, I cannot guarantee any numbers at all. I have never had the kinds of losses Dee had (which actually came from repeated regression, very stressful) in all my years. The only thing I guarantee is that if you have one hive, it's going to die at some point.

It took me five years to get 75% loss. My big losses came from climate upsets. West coast bees had never encountered temps lower than 20 degrees overnight. They had never had a day when it didn't get above freezing. Then when I moved them to Arkansas, they found temps to 0, and freezing for three or four days continuously. I wonder what will happen with future moves.


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## zhiv9 (Aug 3, 2012)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*

I am just thinking that if the goal is to have no one treating their bees, then we need a method of transition that doesn't involve sacrificing the livelihood of the beekeeper that derives all or part of his income from his bees. If the Soft Bond method isn't the answer than maybe the Bond test on an isolated subset makes sense.


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## Hazel-Rah (May 12, 2013)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*

*sigh* I am not attempting to turn this into a thread about cows, BUT I live and work with cows everyday. Have been living and working around beef and dairy cows for several years, my farmer mentors have been working with cows for 40 years... My above comments were specifically geared toward the metaphor between dairy industry production levels(where cows are out of production between 3-7 years versus the 14-17 years of grass-fed) and commercial production of bees.

My observations are not invalid, but they might be different from yours.

solomon parker - it's interesting that you noticed propolis declining through natural selection - I've had it increasing! Perhaps that is environmental?

zhiv9 - the only method I can come up with for transitioning _everybody_ to treatment free without sacrificing livelihood, would be to radically change the paradigm of market values. I don't think that's going to happen. And even if it did, some people would still want to treat their bees... It's a personal choice really, not a fascist movement.


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## Solomon Parker (Dec 21, 2002)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*



Hazel-Rah said:


> it's interesting that you noticed propolis declining through natural selection - I've had it increasing! Perhaps that is environmental?


It may very well be, I would certainly not say that this is a standard result. We have a very soft propolis here, not many pine trees, very sticky and soft. Other that I have seen can be very hard. What does it all mean? I don't know. I've only lived in two places in my life, maybe there will be more in the future.


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*



Solomon Parker said:


> For adaptation and evolution to take place, unfit animals need to die before reproducing.


I agree with all you say here Solomon, but here I think this is only part of the story. The mating game is what matters, but failing doesn't have to entail death. Not producing strong drones will do the same thing, not producing many drones similar. We're into statistical effects here - the more drones, and the stronger they are, the better the chances of winning the mating game, and more often. 

The same is true on the queen/swarm side. Bigger colonies will be able to make more, larger swarms, rasing the chances of gene transmission. It isn't only a question of living and dying - its also about being stronger/quicker/keener of sight and scent and so on - that vast collection of skills that supply in totality a 'vigour' that supplies good chances of winning in the competition to make the most offspring from fixed and limited energy resources.




Solomon Parker said:


> Selective breeding modifies that approach, maybe enhancing or speeding it up, maybe subverting and slowing it down, it depends on the breeder. One thing bred out of domesticated animals is the ability and desire to fight back. They are bred big and fat so they don't run or climb or fly well, and I can't really say they've gotten any smarter. In many cases, such as with turkeys, some cows and sheep, they cannot even reproduce without human intervention. I say that's too far and it can't be done with bees. At least throughout the history of domesticated animal breeding, some disease resistance was maintained due to the lack of medications. Such is not the case today.


Its my belief that many of the problems we have today are born of the inappropriate application of the 'veterinary' health-management model to an open mated animal. In closed populations you can get away with breeding into the available treatment environment. In open populations you can't, because it undermines the feral populations, which removes a health-providing function that has, in the past, quietly massively aided beekeepers. The presence of natural selection throwing strength into apiaries in the past allowed beekeepers to get away with poor breeding aims and practices, and now/where it has been removed the apiaries are exposed. This prompts yet more treatments, further undermining the very thing that could restore proper health and vigour. 



Solomon Parker said:


> To recap: There's no evolution going on in this short of a time frame. It is a simple winnowing of traits, favoring a mixture of traits which results in survival.


It is right to call this evolution; though it must be recognised that 'evolution' is something that happens in lots of ways, on lots of different time-scales, simultaniously. Its doesn't just describe the causes of the rise of new species; it also describes the continuous process by which 'fixed' species are fine-tuned to their environment by natural selection. Talk of mite-bee co-evolution in the scientific literature illustrates this point. 'Adaptation' is used in a similar way; these are 'wide' terms. 

Mike (UK)


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*



D Semple said:


> All the selection work being done by the most selective breeders won't last even 2 generations unsupported.


Population husbandry involves continuous selection, and continuous importation of fresh sound genetic material. That's the nature of the art. 

There is nothing new there for bee breeders. What is new is that beekeepers have to realise that, like it or not, they are bee breeders, and their stock will thrive or fail in accordance with their skills in population husbandry.

They can pass the need to breed over to queen suppliers, and make up for deficiencies with treatments and feeds and manipulations. But if you want to be treatment free, then you have to take on the skilled task of selective breeding, and do it in every generation. 

That's 'population husbandry', or what until quite recently was called 'husbandry' or 'farming.'

Mike (UK)


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## zhiv9 (Aug 3, 2012)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*



Hazel-Rah said:


> zhiv9 - the only method I can come up with for transitioning _everybody_ to treatment free without sacrificing livelihood, would be to radically change the paradigm of market values. I don't think that's going to happen. And even if it did, some people would still want to treat their bees... It's a personal choice really, not a fascist movement.


Sure, but I am sure more people would move towards not treating if there was a reliable method that mitigates the sacrifice.


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## JWChesnut (Jul 31, 2013)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*

Solomon Parker postulates: "Adaptation . . . The only way for that to happen is through the Bond Test."

*No*, and this is core point I have tried repeated to make. Much of TF theory and practice I support wholeheartedly. (I will detail that below). However, the so-called "Bond Test" is 1) *not the only way* to raise fitness of lineage, 2) imposes unsustainable sacrifices, 3) actually loses any progress made by the beekeeper. 

I am arguing for a transition to sustainable practice that is not based on cant and rhetoric, but science and selection.

Postulates (cant) I see repeated are -- 
1) Local feral bees are already selected for survival. The Arnot Forest study which seems to one of the few papers that attempts to detect this seems flawed. It assumes wild feral hives are sustained, and is it not true that alternatively, regular loss and recolonization are an equal possibility. In my wild hives (all GPS'd), there is a regular decline and recovery cycle best explained by loss of the colony and a reswarm into the attractive abandoned comb. Several Bee Trees are repeatedly abandoned and recolonized. Seeley moved wild bees to boxes where they experienced mites just like his commercial, he explained this by some sort of "wild hive" essence that was lost. Seems more likely (Occam's Razor) that the feral bees were not unlike the commercial in tolerance. 

In fairness, I've read a paper on Varroa in East Africa, that claims in the decades since its appearance, the bees feral and domesticated have accomodated and the mite is not longer a problem. The claim was made by annecdote, and no data was presented.

The feral swarms I have hived are no more or less likely to express mites and Nosema symptoms, and one succumbed to Tracheal mites which is virtually unheard of in selected, bred lines for a decade. 

I am not situated for feral races to "fix" a variation-- hundreds of hives are trucked to my region to fatten and brood before the Almonds, and some must swarm out, constantly diluting any feral genotype. -- But much of the country is similar, and consists of an unbounded interbreeding population.

There is enough annecdotal evidence on this forum of local races in certain contexts that seem preselected for survival that in fairness I should concede this point for those fortunate enough to live in areas where a local founder population shifted the genotype.

2) (The biggie) "The only way is the Bond Way". This sounds more like a religion than science. Counter examples are manifest. I don't want to rehearse the argument as I have done in several other posts. Until I detect some level of understanding non-exclusivity of the "Bond", we are simply talking past each other. Suffice to say, virtually all 20th century breeding was not done with some "Bond Test". In fact, I am racking my brain for a positive example -where a wild type penetrated an agricultural species passively.

3) "Feral hives have integrated all traits into an optimum." No, much of research on local adaption in plants characterizes local "sinks" that are mal-adaptive in the larger context. We don't live in a Panglossian world where everything rises to the best of all possible solutions. Most local races founder into "ruts" and blink out as soon as they are challenged. Extinction (of populations) occurs more frequently than Speciation- by orders of magnitude.

4) "You can emulate my method in your backyard in your sparetime". Beekeeping should respond to the local situation. If someone is going to have 3 hives in their suburban backyard, they *do not* have a sustainable inter-breeding population, and the core assumption of "Bond-Test" TF-- that an adaptive local genotype must be conserved -- is violated. This formulation is rejected with the claim that a universe of specially adapted local feral stock is waiting in the wings. I am waiting for evidence that this postulated "feral adaption" exists.

So what's to like about the Treatment Free approach:
1) Sort of a backhanded compliment-- it is a reservoir of Varroa still suseptible to chemicals, and will allow rapid reversion to sensitivity. As the TF advocates have pointed out, commercial beekeeping has seen a really short generation time until their hard chemicals become totally ineffective. This is due to the intrinsic breeding capacity of the mite, and mis-application of the chemical. Several studies have measured the generation time until suseptibility to Amitraz has been restored, the mites don't maintain resistance. Originally, Corn BT-GMO was supposed to have a inter-planting of suseptible stock for this same logic.

2) Beekeepers with sufficient colony saturation and isolation will be able to select for their races. (though I maintain that selection must be based on a) measured metric and b) sufficiently out-crossed -- in other words, planned and directed. A point I have been trying to make is free-adaptation by feral stock is an "entropic" process -- the easiest, simplest, and most robust behavior is selected, and the other is lost. Refined traits (like gentleness, resistance to absconding, etc) are jettisoned by the coarse screen of survival, in favor of basic swarm propensity. An ecological principle -- "competitive exclusion" speaks to this -- in a population over time, only one genotype is promoted-- the one with greatest local population growth. In bees, fitness and husbandry are in tension (viz. AHB). Paul McCarty, a TF from NM, and on this forum, but not on these threads, makes this point repeatedly. His local survivor races are AHB, though his goes to lengths to minimize the seriousness of the AHB strain.

3) Mite (and virus) less lethal, hypo-virulence are likely being selected for. I am not sure how hypo-virulence is amplified into a commercial beekeeping universe -- even if migratory beekeeping was suddenly eliminated, horizontal transmission of mites in fixed yards would occur.


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## JWChesnut (Jul 31, 2013)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*

Caucasian bees are notorious for propolis production. The trait is likely an additive one, and can be relatively promoted and repressed in mixed stocks.


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## Solomon Parker (Dec 21, 2002)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*



JWChesnut said:


> Solomon Parker postulates: "Adaptation . . . The only way for that to happen is through the Bond Test."


You know, it's really frustrating when people misquote.

Let's go back and look at exactly what I said was the only way for *IT* to happen.


Solomon Parker said:


> It is a simple winnowing of traits, favoring a mixture of traits which results in survival. It's all about the right mixture. Since we do not yet know what all the traits are, it's best to leave it to the bees to figure it out (figuratively) on their own. The only way for that to happen is through the Bond Test.


Now I ask nicely, if you're going to quote someone, do it accurately. It's really disrespectful and dishonest to misquote or quote selectively in a manner that results in the person saying something they didn't. It's common decency. It's easy to say *No* emphatically when you're refuting something nobody said.





JWChesnut said:


> 1) *not the only way* to raise fitness of lineage,


The more humans breed any organism, be it peach trees or sheep, the less those organisms are fit for the environment.




JWChesnut said:


> 2) imposes unsustainable sacrifices,


No one has yet demonstrated to me that my "sacrifices" are unsustainable or even unjustified.




JWChesnut said:


> I am arguing for a transition to sustainable practice that is not based on cant and rhetoric, but science and selection.


But not based on what is apparently possible. 30% TF doesn't sound like successful to me.


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## JWChesnut (Jul 31, 2013)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*

Well, I'm sorry I put ellipsis in your quote. I do not see how I miscast your position however. You are claiming "bees will figure out the traits they need" (which I assume you mean they will breed a new genotype) and your sole mechanism is Bond Testing.

I am trying to add some nuance and depth to your rather primitive understanding of population genetics. 

Please read this article, THREE AMERICAN TRAGEDIES: CHESTNUT BLIGHT, BUTTERNUT
CANKER, AND DUTCH ELM DISEASE
for perspective on a wide-scale multi-generational "bond testing" in the face of exotic disease and insects.
http://www.nrs.fs.fed.us/pubs/jrnl/1998/1998_exotic-pests-papers/schlarbaum_1998-exoticpests.pdf

Look, Solomon, I don't mind if you keep your hives underwater or at the top of pine trees, with pixie dust, or in solid silver frames. I am trying to add some glimmer of understanding about genetics, so your response to any question doesn't involve your constant chest-thumping about your "system". That's probably intemperate of me, but I also have a depth of experience you would find useful to learn from. I seen young bucks with all the answers before.


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## Solomon Parker (Dec 21, 2002)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*

Chesnut, let me start out by admitting that I have only read the abstract due to time constraints.

But let me state the following as it relates to honeybees. As mentioned in some study quoted in another thread earlier, honeybees are uniquely capable of adaptation against their parasite. Typically it is the parasite that has the advantage, but not so with the honeybee. The honeybee has demonstrated itself capable of adapting to this parasite in a relatively short period of time. It is up to us now to align our methods thereto to benefit all parties involved. So totally unlike all the "you wouldn't let your children or your favorite dog die" comparisons, honeybees need to be evaluated on their own merits.

Let me also clarify that there is no specific genotype involved. This comes from the idea (prevalent in VSH discussions) that there is some purebred bee, some exact combination, some alignment of genes which allows certain hives to survive without treatment, therefore the Bond Test which kills all unfit colonies is responsible for destruction of traits, whole matrilineal lines, and inbreeding. This is demonstrably not the case. It is simply a matter of the balance of a population having a favorable mixture of traits which allows them to survive. As we've seen, these bees are of any race, of many mixtures of traits, and of widely varying rates of specific traits like VSH. It is a favorable mixture of traits, reordering of priorities in the process of finding a balance with the parasite.


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## JWChesnut (Jul 31, 2013)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*

Your mechanism is a testable hypothesis.
I understand you saying that fitness is selected for a the whole-apiary level. An apiary of some optimum size would have higher relative variation, and the variation would translate into individual colonies with enhanced variation due to wild out-crossing. Colonies with higher variation (more diverse fathers represented) would have better performance. 

A hypothesis test would collect mitoDNA (female lineage) and compare survival (or honey production or disease risk) amongst apiaries with different levels of variation. MitoDNA primers and characterization has become quasi-automatic and inexpensive. Your hypothesis could be tested.

You are describing the process of reversion to mean which is, of course, the central core of the position I am trying to communicate.


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## Solomon Parker (Dec 21, 2002)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*

I am describing a model that fits the observations. Most I hear do not. I can only speak from my experience.


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## julysun (Apr 25, 2012)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*

Error in post.


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## frazzledfozzle (May 26, 2010)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*

I'm puzzling over a couple of questions. 
I'm not good at putting thoughts on paper and I don't have the skills to say things in a scholarly way so please excuse the basic language.

A hive is made of one queen (I know there's more than one queen in a hive alot of times but for the sake of this question it's irrelevant) with offspring from many different drones. I'm wondering how it can work that a hive can survive treatment free with so many different paternal lines of bees in the hive is it luck of the draw that all or most the drones the queen has mated with are mite tolerant or is it enough that only the queen shows those traits?

Another thought is how can a colony adjust/adapt to mites when the individual bees themselves live for such a short period.

And lastly is it feasable that you could keep your bees without treatments up until they started to show symptoms of mite problems and then treat and repeat meaning you leave your bees to deal with mites until they are over run but rather than letting them be over run and die you stop the mite the bees recover and as the mites build up again the bees are left to deal with them etc etc thereby giving the bees longterm exposure to mites but maybe building up some sort of defence against them.

A bit like a flu vaccine


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## Hazel-Rah (May 12, 2013)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*

Without covering a lot of the ground that has been spoken about, I would say... Why would you go through the time and expense of treatments on a genetic line that needs improvement? 

People who are seriously breeding bees with the intention of developing mite resistance have isolated mating yards. They introduce the drone stock they need. It is not enough that only the queens display this behavior, their daughters can have any variability of that. However, a drone will posses ONLY the genetics of the queen mother has, and is actually a more direct conduit of resistance. I should also add that if you happen to live somewhere that there is a population of feral bees, those drones show much higher competition over managed colony drones.

In your hypothetical hive, if it is a critical mite load on non-treatment, VSH - you are looking at your 2nd or probably 3rd year before collapse. So, you have probably already made splits from this hive, maybe multiple times. Or if you are judicious breeder, you are only making nucs/grafting out of 3rd year plus queens anyway. You are either going to re-queen this hive with a brood break (or I am sure others will have something else to say), or cull it at the end of the year. Extract all the honey and use the equipment for the next nuc. So in my book, that's not a loss...

You can't help the individual bees in a hive build resistance through medicating. Or any bees, anywhere. I also, don't get a flu vaccine


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*



Hazel-Rah said:


> In your hypothetical hive, if it is a critical mite load on non-treatment, VSH - you are looking at your 2nd or probably 3rd year before collapse.


You present a good case Hazel - Rah. But where Frazz, and for that matter I, live, it's a different location and climate, it's different mites, and it's different bees. No Africanised genetics here. Untreated hives collapse in 12 months, and there are no ferals. I was able to spin some untreated bees out for two years, but that was untreated small cell foundation, multiple lines of bees, and most importantly, aggressive and constant splitting. So, not really resistance.

It's taken me a while to figure it out, but the cause of a lot of these arguments / disagreements or whatever you want to call them, is simply because peoples experience has been different, but they then think that their experience should apply to everyone else. But it doesn't. So Bernhard for example (Germany), said his untreated bees typically lasted 4 years. But bees would never last that long here, yet at the other extreme there are people saying he must have missed something because 4 years is not long enough.

In the US there has been mites for a long time, and treatments started to become ineffective a long time ago also, so losses were big, 30% annual average or so. Coincide all this with the arrival of African genetics, and you have the recipe for whittling away at less resistant bees, whether in a commercial setting or otherwise, and the slow incorporation from African bees of mite resistant traits. 

So Mike Bispham, is yet another example. No African genetics in his country via the same heritage as the US ones, but there are some selected African genetics, via Brother Adam, and possibly other sources. But they may be different to the US ones. So Mike Bisphams chances of success will be less than an average US hobbyist, as you guys have proven mite resistant bees, and the ones that have been properly DNA tested show Africanised genes. Mike does not have that. But he has some chance of success, because there are some African genetics in his country, although of unproven worth against mites. But his chances of success, while less than yours, would be greater then mine here, with no African genetics.

So I believe this is what is being lost, the importance of location. Everybody is telling everybody else what they should be doing and what should be happening, based on their own experience, in their own location, with their own bees. Forgetting the situation elsewhere can be, and is, totally different. In addition to people talking from just their own experience, is people talking from no experience at all.

Once these factors are understood, I believe 90% of the destructive argument that has occurred on this topic over the years, can be eradicated.


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## heaflaw (Feb 26, 2007)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*

Oldtimer:

Very good point and very well said.


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## heaflaw (Feb 26, 2007)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*



Oldtimer said:


> there are no ferals. .


I've read that in the US, about 5% of ferals/untreateds survived the onslaught of varroa. Does New Zealand have NO ferals left or maybe a very small percentage in some locations that survived?

Also, I am not sure about the African genetics being the reason for mite resistance in the US. Varroa arrived long before Africanized bees migrated into the US from South America. I always assumed resistance in the US was much the same as the Pimorsky bees, which probably did not have any African genetic influence either, and were able to somehow survive.


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*

Thanks Heaflaw, I take your point, it can never be proved there are NO feral survivors. What I can say, is despite time, money, and the resources of a government funded project to find "feral survivors", none have been found or documented. Had 5% of our ferals survived, we would have them everywhere. I have in the past, had a number of people on Beesource argue vehemently with me about this, saying it's wrong, there must be feral survivors. That, again, is them applying their experience, to a different place.

I too, have read that in the US around 5% of ferals survived the initial varroa onslaught. I've also read that they didn't. Seems like it is an open question.

Re the African genetics thing, it is just a theory I am putting up, although there is good evidence that is consistent with it. But first re the primorsky bees, you are quite right they have some mite resist mechanisms, I am not saying it is completely impossible for other bee strains to achieve resistance in fact I very much hope that it is possible, even for Italians. Primorsky's did it without human help so as a result some of their mechanisms, such as say, excessive swarming, need work, from a standpoint of their usefulness to humans.
But back to Africans, the arguably two best known commercial treatment free US beekeepers would be Beeweaver, and Dee Lusby. Bees from both of those have tested positive for African genetics. There are other treatment free commercial beekeepers, it would be interesting to DNA test their bees. It has been documented around the world, that where there are African or Africanised bees, once varroa arrive there is an initial die off but the bees quickly adapt, so fast, they are generally regarded as resistant.

Varroa did arrive in the US before African bees, but not much. For example for Beeweaver, both arrived at the same time. Which MIGHT have been a fortunate coincidence for them. 

The bees we have in New Zealand are a much more limited range genetically than what you have in the US. Bees have not been imported for many years because we don't want the diseases that other countries have. The first bees here were AMM's from England, and they persisted and made up most of the approx. 4 million feral hives, until varroa arrived and exterminated them, you don't see an AMM now. The other breed was Italian, recognised internationally as a poor performer against varroa, and in the last few years some carniolan semen was imported. It has been noticed here that the carniolans tend to do better against varroa than Italians, but none are fully resistant.


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*



frazzledfozzle said:


> A hive is made of one queen (I know there's more than one queen in a hive alot of times but for the sake of this question it's irrelevant) with offspring from many different drones. I'm wondering how it can work that a hive can survive treatment free with so many different paternal lines of bees in the hive is it luck of the draw that all or most the drones the queen has mated with are mite tolerant or is it enough that only the queen shows those traits?


I've seen it said in at least two places (this will be in the scientific literature, because I only commit to memory statements from the scientific literature) that only a few mite resistant patrilines are needed to make a hive mite resistant. But I think that needs qualification: 

There are several - perhaps many - behaviours that confer a measure of resistance. Its likely that the behaviour that was referred to above was uncapping, but any combination of useful behaviours within a colony will contribute toward an overal ability to manage mites successfully. 

Of any gene combination confering a specific behaviour: If the queen has two copies and any drone (sperm - which I think has two copies of the same gene throughout) the same, there will be a 100% certainty of the gene coming down. If the queen has one copy, and the drone 2, a 75% chance. If the queen has none... and so on. I'm not clear about this stuff, because it isn't important to my approach - but there is info here if you want to get stuck in: http://www.glenn-apiaries.com/genetics.html

If you want learn about genetic transmission of heritable traits a short history of the work of the chap who uncovered it all is probably a good place to start: http://anthro.palomar.edu/mendel/mendel_1.htm

It isn't relevant in part because the qualities of the queen you get will depend on so many things that all you can really do is press the right sort of drones toward her mother as best you can, and take her mother from a thriving hive - and that's the best you can do. Yes, luck of the draw is very much how it all works, but you can seriously load the cards in your favour.




frazzledfozzle said:


> Another thought is how can a colony adjust/adapt to mites when the individual bees themselves live for such a short period.


It can't and it doesn't. It thrives, ticks along, or dies. What adapts is the local population. Those genes that confer the necessary behaviours are reproduced more often than alternatives that don't - as human selection or natural selection, or both, remove the latter from the gene pool.  The population as a whole thereby becomes more resistant. That's why we talk about 'population husbandry'.



frazzledfozzle said:


> And lastly is it feasable that you could keep your bees without treatments up until they started to show symptoms of mite problems and then treat and repeat meaning you leave your bees to deal with mites until they are over run but rather than letting them be over run and die you stop the mite the bees recover and as the mites build up again the bees are left to deal with them etc etc thereby giving the bees longterm exposure to mites but maybe building up some sort of defence against them.


There is no mechanism known to science whereby individual bees or individual colonies can acquire the abilities needed to manage mites during their lifetime.[1] Either they are born with the behaviours or they are not. If they are not you want to a) know about it quickly, b) requeen them in the hope that the new queen will produce bees that will have them. Rather than gamble that she might have them, its best to take steps to raise the chances that she will... by raising her from resistant stock, and and putting resistant drones around for her to mate with.



frazzledfozzle said:


> A bit like a flu vaccine


There are no vaccines, and they would only make matters worse (in the same way treatments do). No short cuts. Just population husbandry, as performed for several thousand years.

Mike (UK)

[1] Some people postulate an 'epigenetic effect' which seems quite scientifically reasonable. Some people will insist quite vigoursly that it happens on the basis of their own experience. But to my knowledge there is no published scientific work showing this happening in the case of mite resistance in honeybees. So it is a theory without scientific demonstration.


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*



mike bispham said:


> I've seen it said in at least two places (this will be in the scientific literature, because I only commit to memory statements from the scientific literature) that only a few mite resistant patrilines are needed to make a hive mite resistant.


Could you link them please Mike I would like to get the full context.


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*



Oldtimer said:


> Could you link them please Mike I would like to get the full context.


If I come across them I will. If you look up the post I made recently in response to your request for links about uncapping behaviour, I think you'll find something about this in one of those also. But it would take some time for me to actually find them - I don't have an index - and I'm unwilling to spend it on you. If you'd like to cultivate my affection with apologies about previous behaviour, thanks for previous efforts I've made on your behalf or something of that sort I might be more willing in future to do work on your behalf.

If you search for 'mite resistance' and 'patrilines' you'll probably be able to turn something up fairly quickly. I expect you can evaluate the relevance and trustworthyness of the sources yourself. 

Mike (UK)


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*

Already searched. Nothing to back your claim. 

Since you said you have committed them to memory I thought it would not be a hard thing for you so I asked.

These references would mean you could be taken seriously.


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*



Oldtimer said:


> So Mike Bisphams chances of success will be less than an average US hobbyist, as you guys have proven mite resistant bees, and the ones that have been properly DNA tested show Africanised genes. Mike does not have that. But he has some chance of success, because there are some African genetics in his country, although of unproven worth against mites. But his chances of success, while less than yours, would be greater then mine here, with no African genetics.


Its is often said (in the scientific literature) that in any bee population, all races, with no exposure to varroa, 95% will have no resistance. It is however, there, carried in the background in a small proportion of the population, waiting, as it were, until its needed.

(We are talking in rounded out terms here - leaving out all the complications about patrilines and different sorts of resistance, and co-evolution of mites... - but that's fine for our purposes)

When exposure to varroa occurs, that 95% will die. The popluation will rebuild from the survivors, preserving in each generation the genes that confer the necessary behaviours. (This is thought to take between 10 and 20 years in nature). Now the population may be 80, or 90 or 95% resistant.

European bees now have some 25 years of exposure, and there are increasing reports of thriving feral honeybees. I know - solidly - of some myself. US bees have shorter exposure, but again there are increasing reports of feral resistance. In the US humal selection by small beekeepers and research bodies and some breeders has also helped. But in both countries massive producton of treatment-addicted queens has prevented, and continues to prevent, fuller adaptation. 

As far as I'm aware (I know nothing) NZ bees have a shorter exposure to varroa, and few or no efforts have been made toward allowing or facilitating adaptation. If that's so, yes, you will be starting with a harder task than people working with US or European bees.

Note: It isn't the race that is resistant - people talk about Russians being resistant - its just that the population source of that race has had some exposure, and levels of resistance are accordingly high. 



Oldtimer said:


> So I believe this is what is being lost, the importance of location. Everybody is telling everybody else what they should be doing and what should be happening, based on their own experience, in their own location, with their own bees. Forgetting the situation elsewhere can be, and is, totally different.


I've never forgotten this. And its why I focus on the _principles_ of population husbandry, and the relation of population husbandry to natural selection for the fittest strains. _Principles_ apply _everywhere_ _anytime._ 



Oldtimer said:


> Once these factors are understood, I believe 90% of the destructive argument that has occurred on this topic over the years, can be eradicated.


People come from different knowledge backgrounds and have different approaches to knowledge, and different ways of expressing them. Some clashes are inevitable. But if civility is maintained, constructive questioning can make a huge difference to the way the causes are understood and prioritised, as different explanations are shifted, examined and sorted. Its a process.

In case anyone is interested, one of the most powerful knowledge seeking tools in history was invented in the 5th C. BC, in Ancient Greece. It goes by the name 'Socratic dialogue'. Its nothing more than the process of earnest question and response undertaken by honest truth-seeking 'interlocutors' (participants). Its the foundation of all modern scientific enquiry, and most of our day to day exchanges. I highly recommend it. (BTW the idea of universal, eternal _principles_ was also invented at about the same time)

Mike (UK)


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*



Oldtimer said:


> Already searched. Nothing to back your claim.
> 
> Since you said you have committed them to memory I thought it would not be a hard thing for you so I asked.
> 
> These references would mean you could be taken seriously.


Keep trying. It takes time to find the stuff you want. I try to commit ideas to memory (if they are soundly sourced - and I also commit with them something of the degree of soundness). Sometimes I remember authors. But titles, publishers, urls, how I found them - not so good. Now if it were books - I'd tell you the colour and size of the book, where it is in my house, or which library I got it from, whether its near the front, in the middle, toward the back, and on a left or right page, and where on the page. Funny things memory systems - everyone's different. Mine is very spatial. Not much good in the internet age.

Mike (UK)


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*



mike bispham said:


> Its is often said (in the scientific literature) that in any bee population, all races, with no exposure to varroa, 95% will have no resistance.


Mike I don't think that is often said in the scientific literature, particularly with regard to "all races". If you are going to quote scientific literature, please quote it, so we can see.

With regards to your former request that I do a search put context on your claim that "only a few mite resistant patrilines are needed to make a hive mite resistant", I did actually get a result, it was this, but hardly authoritative.



WLC said:


> Mike:
> 
> People are asking questions because they're interested, thus the drawing out of the explanations.
> 
> ...





mike bispham said:


> No. You clearly want to disrupt the discussion. I'm going to abandon the thread and start another. Please don't hijack that one too.


If that's the best you got, well, no reasonable person could buy your theory.


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*



mike bispham said:


> Keep trying. It takes time to find the stuff you want.


Mike I'm disappointed that you have once again turned what I hoped would be a promising discussion into absurdity. We have already been through this discussion, that when you present one of your theories, it is not my job to prove it, it is yours.

To be even more clear. I think two of your theories are wrong, and are not in any scientific literature, contrary to what you have told us. You will not prove otherwise by telling me to go look for it. Why would I continue looking for something that does not exist.

How would you react if I presented some unproven theory, claimed it was in scientific literature, then if you queried me on it, I told you that you had to go look for the proof not me. Well the answer is you would decide I never knew what I was talking about in the first place of course.


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## Daniel Y (Sep 12, 2011)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*



Solomon Parker said:


> But let me state the following as it relates to honeybees. As mentioned in some study quoted in another thread earlier, honeybees are uniquely capable of adaptation against their parasite. Typically it is the parasite that has the advantage, but not so with the honeybee. The honeybee has demonstrated itself capable of adapting to this parasite in a relatively short period of time.


Why then have we not seen it. How is it that bees did not simply adapt to Varroa causing it to be such an issue?

I realize that one answer is that we treat, weakening the bees ability to adapt. What mechanisms are being weakened and how?


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*



Oldtimer said:


> If that's the best you got, well, no reasonable person could buy your theory.


You'll just have to think of it as a lead for now. Take it or leave it. I'll undertake to share it with you if I bump into it, and if I remember, and if you haven't irritated me too much. I'll hope I can expect the same of you.

Apart from anything else its common sense! Do you think it needs every single patriline to exhibit every single mite-management behaviour? The more you have, the better things will be, up to a point where that's no longer the case. (Over-expression of some traits brings undesirable costs - bees are uncapping too much when they should be getting in honey or something of that sort. That's something else I've read in the literature, and I can't direct you to it. I think its attached to Marla Spivak's work in my mind, but I'm not 100% sure. It wasn't recently that I read it.)

It can be difficult and frustrating and time consuming tracking down scientific items like this, and I sympathise with you. You really want to know, and you feel I'm much closer to the answer than you. Actually I'm probably not (though I might be). 

I often wish I was more of a catalogue type, but I'm not, I'm a skimmer, unless I'm working on a definite narrow project and I know I'll want a reference to hand.

Mike (UK)


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*

Well I have exactly the same problem Mike, I read stuff and cannot remember the link to everything either.

But on those particular theories, they are incorrect, they are not in any scientific literature, there is no evidence, and never will be. I will not be waiting until you "bump into it", I'll go with your "take it or leave it" advice, and leave it.


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*



Oldtimer said:


> Well I have exactly the same problem Mike, I read stuff and cannot remember the link to everything either.


I've been studying this stuff sporadically, sometimes intensively, for 20 years. For about 5 of them I had access to academic journals; and often I've been sent papers by others that are only available to subscribers. Add to that: when trawling the net you often follow links to more links to more links, and end up in places that are not bought up by search engines. 

If I were inclined, my next step would probably be to use my on-computer search engine to look through my own collection. That might turn up a result quickly, it might not, I might spend 1/2 an hour on it and then give up.

The context in which I saw it might come to me sometime in the next few days. 



Oldtimer said:


> But on those particular theories, they are incorrect, they are not in any scientific literature, there is no evidence, and never will be.


I don't know where you learned logic. None of those entailments are valid.



Oldtimer said:


> I will not be waiting until you "bump into it", I'll go with your "take it or leave it" advice, and leave it.


Suit yourself. And given your attitude I won't bother giving it any more attention.

I'll give you some advice though: understand you don't need to understand all the infinite details. You need to understand, and apply, the principles.

Mike (UK)


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*

Well good that's over, anyway.

And as I suspected your statements remain unsupported.

I'm hoping it means that we don't have to listen to any more of you telling us all what an incredibly well formed character you are, get's rather tedious from someone who can never back anything.

When you are ready for a sensible discussion about bees, let's know. I like practicle bee stuff over unsupported theories any day.


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## Solomon Parker (Dec 21, 2002)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*



frazzledfozzle said:


> I'm wondering how it can work that a hive can survive treatment free with so many different paternal lines of bees in the hive is it luck of the draw that all or most the drones the queen has mated with are mite tolerant or is it enough that only the queen shows those traits?


So the question is then: how many individual bees of the total population need a mixture of traits necessary to keep the hive afloat? How many then does it take to make the hive thrive?





frazzledfozzle said:


> Another thought is how can a colony adjust/adapt to mites when the individual bees themselves live for such a short period.


The colony doesn't and nobody says it does. That's why there needs to be birth and death. If this hive doesn't have what it takes, it dies. If it does, I multiply it. The next generation faces the same test. While it's easy to crash at first, it becomes statistically less likely as time goes on.





frazzledfozzle said:


> And lastly is it feasable that you could keep your bees without treatments up until they started to show symptoms of mite problems and then treat and repeat meaning you leave your bees to deal with mites until they are over run but rather than letting them be over run and die you stop the mite the bees recover and as the mites build up again the bees are left to deal with them etc etc thereby giving the bees longterm exposure to mites but maybe building up some sort of defence against them.


Firstly, I hear from the commercial beekeepers that by the time they are overrun, it's too late for any treatment. But secondly, without the cycle of birth and death, there is no winnowing and reordering to produce the mixture of traits necessary to survive and thrive.





frazzledfozzle said:


> A bit like a flu vaccine


No, not really at all.


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## squarepeg (Jul 9, 2010)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*



JWChesnut said:


> Your mechanism is a testable hypothesis.
> A hypothesis test would collect mitoDNA (female lineage) and compare survival (or honey production or disease risk) amongst apiaries with different levels of variation. MitoDNA primers and characterization has become quasi-automatic and inexpensive. Your hypothesis could be tested.


this sounds like it would be a good project for a graduate student. i believe i may be in a pocket where resistant traits have developed in the feral population. it would be interesting to know if markers could be identified for overall vigor and other desirable traits and then promoted in queen breeding programs.


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## JWChesnut (Jul 31, 2013)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*

>Square peg writes: "to know if markers could be identified for overall vigor and other desirable traits"

Some traits have been localized to particular genes -- the grooming behavior gene seems to have a homolog in the human gene that expresses in obsessive compulsive//autism disorders -- so primers and sequences are known. See: Tsurudaj, J.M., M.E. Arechavaleta-Velascoee, K.I. Alcala-Escamillaee, C.A. Robles-Riosee& G. J. Huntj - INVESTIGATING THE ROLE OF NEUREXIN I IN HONEY BEE MITE-GROOMING BEHAVIOR. QTL is the acronym for the process of detecting the segments of nuclear DNA that expresses traits, and Maria Spivak and others are working hard on this effort. 

I am a proposing a far more broader scheme -- in response to Solomon's prejudice toward an integrative process, where individual expression is less critical than some [amorphous] total fitness of the superorganism. And "overall vigor" is going to integrative. We want to test Solomon's theory with science, because otherwise he will simply trumpet his prejudice.

Mitochondria DNA (mtDNA) is extra-sexual, and is only transmitted by the mother (it prescribes the metabolism of unfertilized eggs and is incorporated into the growing larvae). mtDNA is extra-sexual, but drones as haploid products of the mother posses mom's mitochondria. mtDNA drifts through somatic mutation, and is "clocked", distances between sequences can be use to approximate division in space and time. Netting a collection of drones would allow you to see the relative relatedness of the paternal line (they bear the maternal DNA, they just don't transmit it). This is a proxy, rather than direct measure of variation, but because mtDNA has been typed worldwide it is a robust measure of lineage. The hypothesis is "A greater number of patrilines present in an apiary predicts greater vigor measured by metric X". 

I will note, impishly, that Solomon's New Model formulation is directly in opposition to the M. Bush model. If I understand Bush's theory it is: "Local survivors have been winnowed to a very small set of resistant genotypes. This reduced founder population is a new racial genotype and can be amplified". The mtDNA hypothesis prediction of the M. Bush model is: "An apiary with greater vigor will have a very small set of patrilines because of their very recent selection pressure". 

A testable hypothesis using Bush model is also possible, and would predict, lower patriline variation, and apiaries in different regions to have very unrelated patrilines (due to local survivor founder effect).

Now, I am going to make some popcorn and wait for Solomon to attack Bush because Solomon knows for certain his model is better.


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## squarepeg (Jul 9, 2010)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*

in dr. delaplane's presentation, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txZtQrMTeag , he cites a paper by tarpy and seeley that showed increased vigor (disease resistance) as drone matings approach 10, with diminished improvement after that.

how does this relate to the above hypotheses that you propose testing.


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*



JWChesnut said:


> >Square peg writes: "to know if markers could be identified for overall vigor and other desirable traits"
> 
> Some traits have been localized to particular genes -- the grooming behavior gene seems to have a homolog in the human gene that expresses in [...] I am a proposing a far more broader scheme -- in response to Solomon's prejudice toward an integrative process, where individual expression is less critical than some [amorphous] total fitness of the superorganism. And "overall vigor" is going to integrative.


Who can follow that? K.I.S.S: What works works; that is: within a population, removal of the least able results in improvements in overall fitness in the next generation. 

As a beekeeper aiming to improve resistance and vigour year on year what I need to know is the best ways to maximise the probability of achieving those aims. 

Odd how so many people want to talk about technical details that have such limited bearing on bee husbandry. Its not rocket science. If you want to improve vigour and resistance take out the weakest, requeening from the best, and other steps to press the desired genes forward. The only thing worth discussing is the practical details of how best to do that. These, as noted, vary from setting to setting, and the effect of the various factors lead to different approaches.

If you want to not improve or to weaken your stocks, don't. 

Listen to experience: "You don't need to know how it works: you just need to know that it works." John Kefuss.

Mike (UK)


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## Solomon Parker (Dec 21, 2002)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*



JWChesnut said:


> Now, I am going to make some popcorn and wait for Solomon to attack Bush because Solomon knows for certain his model is better.


You haven't been around here very long have you?

I'm not sure what the New Model is, maybe you're trying to tie into NT Wright's New Perspective, I don't know. What I do know is that I have a set of observations for which I posit a hypothesis which I believe explains those observations. Michael Bush does similarly, a similar set of observations and a similar hypothesis. He puts more emphasis on small cell. I put more emphasis on breeding. It's really not that big a deal.





mike bispham said:


> Blah blah. Yawn. Sorry. Who can follow that? Who cares?


Friend, this is not acceptable and you need to knock it off.


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## squarepeg (Jul 9, 2010)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*

to quote chemguy's tagline:

"To study and not think is a waste. To think and not study is dangerous."

obviously mike you haven't discovered yet that when it comes to bees what seems intuitive isn't necessarily borne out in practice.

it is estimated that it took 150 years for a. ceranae and v. jacobsconi to reach a host/parasite equilibrium. fortunately neither became extinct in the process.

let us know when (by your excellent husbandry) your bees have reached this point.


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## JWChesnut (Jul 31, 2013)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*

Square Peg writes:
"tarpy and seeley that showed increased vigor (disease resistance) as drone matings approach 10"
and Delaplane finds better performance at up to 60 artificial matings.

We risk going off into the weeds here, because Solomon's New Model argues for selection at the apiary level (in bio-speak, Meta-population). The number of drone matings is at the super-organism level (i.e. organizationally below the meta-population), and genotype traits are usually thought of as the maternal line or hybrid crossings.

I don't endorse Solomon's New Model, though I think it has a germ of really good insight. SNM (a 3-letter acronym with his name) essentially addresses the inbreeding depression that has accompanied the industrial production of Italian bees. A survey of mito-type for African lineage found a grand total of 6 mito-types in commercial apiaries from southern breeders. The specialization of queen breeding to a regional mass production has shrunk the available variation, quite predictably.

A common thread for some successful beekeepers is their incorporation of diverse bloodlines (the anti-Italians). Is the disease resistance of these beekeepers in aggregate at the apiary level (TF or not) higher or lower, I don't know but this could be tested. Other beekeepers seem to practice husbandry that conserves bloodlines (TF or not), and this would form a separate testable group. This forms a 2x2 factorial matrix -- TF-Diverse, TF-Inbred, Treated-Diverse, and Treated-Inbred. There are enormously robust statistics for this sort of factorial design, so relatively small sample sizes would yield a result.


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*



squarepeg said:


> it is estimated that it took 150 years for a. ceranae and v. jacobsconi to reach a host/parasite equilibrium.


I'm going to get flack for doing this, deservedly, but by whom? Can we have a reference?

In the early days there were lots of noises about how it will take European honeybees tens of thousands of years to adapt to varroa - and these partly underpinned the rationale for treating.

If someone has made a proper study I'd like to see it. And I'd like to know most, how systematic continent-wide treatments figure as a variable. Because that factor is the key variable.

Mike (UK)


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## squarepeg (Jul 9, 2010)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*

my apologies mike, i found that i misrepresented what was actually said here:

http://www.cals.ncsu.edu/entomology/apiculture/pdfs/2.16 copy.pdf

it would have been better to have said that the russian strain has had 150 years in developing its measurable resistance against mites.


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## squarepeg (Jul 9, 2010)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*

i think i get that jwc, thanks.

we have an excellent agricultural university here, (auburn), and i was thinking about approaching them to see if they were interested in doing some metrics on my treatment free apiary.


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*



Oldtimer said:


> I think two of your theories are wrong, and are not in any scientific literature, contrary to what you have told us.


Here is the reference you require for the item about only a few patrilines being needed. My emphasis:

"Queen honey bee mates to c. 10 males. _*Colony can be hygienic if only 1
or 2 patrilines are hygienic*_. Only 10% or 20% queens reared will be of
hygienic patrilines unless intracolony selection is used."

Hygienic Behaviour
School of Life Sciences
University of Sussex
Francis L. W. Ratnieks

pg 92 of slide show: http://localhost:8020/file/C:/2010+...lides/Francis_Ratneiks_Bee_Behaviour.pptx.pdf

(It seems clear that the second statement is using the mating number supplied by the first, i.e. IF the queen mates with 10 drones resulting in just 1 or 2 hygienic patrilines, then the chances of paternally passed hygienic genes in the next generation is just 10% or 20%. This does not bear specifically on our narrow issue - its a supplementary item as far as I can see)



Oldtimer said:


> How would you react if I presented some unproven theory, claimed it was in scientific literature, then if you queried me on it, I told you that you had to go look for the proof not me. Well the answer is you would decide I never knew what I was talking about in the first place of course.


Well, yes you're right. But a reasonable correspondent would acknowledge that it isn't always easy to do. Now you have the reference I hope you will have the grace to amend your intemperate remarks. 

If I turn up any further references to the same issue I'll pass them on - more to preserve my reputation than to help you mind. Meanwhile, the following might supply you with a lead to further literature. If you consider the bit I've emboldened you'll see that tells the same story, by implication:

Individuals within a honey bee colony have variation in relatedness and
heritable traits due to the polyandrous mating behavior of the queen. This
results in different patrilines, which can reduce the probability of individuals in
a colony sharing alleles. Although some individuals may possess mite resistant
genes, *if not enough individuals share this genotype it will not influence the
resistance at the colony level* (Perez-Sato et al., 2009). Therefore, colony level
phenotypes are less consistent in the expression of traits in the next generation
and may require strong selection on drones in the population to ensure that
many patrilines share a particular trait. Controlling the paternal source is the
most difficult part of selective breeding programs with honey bees. This may
explain why artificial selection has not yet been sustainably successful at
producing mite-resistant honey bees and why natural selection, that includes
selection on the drones in the population, has provided long-term mite
surviving populations on Gotland and in Avignon.

Host-Parasite Adaptations and
Interactions Between Honey Bees,
Varroa Mites and Viruses
Barbara Locke
Faculty Natural Resources and Agricultural Sciences
Department of Ecology
Uppsala, 2012
http://pub.epsilon.slu.se/9036/1/locke_b_120912.pdf

In my view the commonsense argument I made earlier holds. The more the better until a cost of some sort outweighs the benefits. 

Again, we're in don't-need-to-know country, but its interesting enough stuff.

If you want to remind me what the second item was I'll carry on trying to find a reference to that too.

Mike (UK)


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*



squarepeg said:


> my apologies mike, i found that i misrepresented what was actually said here:
> 
> http://www.cals.ncsu.edu/entomology/apiculture/pdfs/2.16 copy.pdf
> 
> it would have been better to have said that the russian strain has had 150 years in developing its measurable resistance against mites.


Thanks SP. The text is:

"These Russian bees had been exposed to varroa
mites for approximately 150 years, much longer than other
Apis mellifera strains had, and the researchers surmised
that the Russian bees could have developed a resistance
to the mites. Indeed, subsequent research has shown that
these Russian bees are more than twice as resistant to varroa
mites than other honey bees."

There is no reason from this text not to surmise that resistance could not have become well established naturally in, say, 10 years. There is no evidence in this text for any length of time to be preferred, other than '150 years was enough'

It might be worth saying: there is no reason why Russians should't lose their resistance, given a long enough period of treatments. Remove the pressure, the trait will fade. 

Mike (UK)


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*



mike bispham said:


> Here is the reference you require for the item about only a few patrilines being needed. My emphasis:
> 
> "Queen honey bee mates to c. 10 males. _*Colony can be hygienic if only 1
> or 2 patrilines are hygienic*_. Only 10% or 20% queens reared will be of
> hygienic patrilines unless intracolony selection is used."


Thanks Mike, you looked so bad demanding links from everybody else, but refusing to back your own claims.

Problem though, the link doesn't work, and the quote you have given, does not back your former statement.

So you'll need to get your link right so I can see the context of what is being said. At this point, there is no evidence for your claims.

I note that you recently asked Squarepeg for a link, and he supplied one immediately. No insults, name calling, demands you find it, or other such babyish behaviour, he simply supplied it. You could learn much from squarepeg about adult behaviour, and conversational etiquette. If you were capable of the same level of courtesy, these threads would be totally different.


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*



Oldtimer said:


> Problem though, the link doesn't work,


Here is another: https://www.sussex.ac.uk/webteam/gateway/file.php?name=hygieneworkshop2011-handout.pdf&site=60

From a write-up of a talk given by Prof. Ratnieks:

"Research has shown that hygienic behaviour (i.e. the prompt removal by the workers of dead or diseased larvae) reduces the spread of diseases such as foulbrood and chalkbrood within a colony and furthermore disrupts the breeding cycle of Varroa mites. This hygienic behaviour is a genetic trait, is therefore inherited, and can be bred for using normal breeding methods. Surprisingly, only about 10% of British colonies are classed as 'hygienic'; moreover, within a hygienic colony perhaps only about 10% of the workers actually perform the hygiene tasks, though this is enough to make that colony hygienic. Professor Ratnieks used the analogy of a student household, often a fairly 'unhygienic' environment. However, even if only one or two of the housemates start to perform housework, this may well be enough to render the household (relatively) 'hygienic'!"




Oldtimer said:


> and the quote you have given, does not back your former statement.


I think it goes quite a long way. I'd also prefer to see a study of that particular issue. Perhaps we can find one (see a later post)



Oldtimer said:


> No insults, name calling, demands you find it, or other such babyish behaviour, [...] You could learn much from squarepeg about adult behaviour, and conversational etiquette.


I think perhaps you should take a look in the mirror.

Mike (UK)


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*

On the topic of the number of patrilines needed to confer hygienic behahior; this again is topically tangental, but a good clue is supplied in the emboldened statement. I've included a large extract to give context and because its all interesting stuff:

"One key honeybee defence mechanism that has received considerable attention is hygienic behaviour (reviewed by Spivak and Gilliam (1998)). This behaviour is carried out by workers as a defence against various brood diseases, such as the bacteria Paenibacillus larvae (Rothenbuhler, 1964), the chalkbrood fungus Ascosphaera apis (Milne, 1983) and the mite Varroa destructor (Spivak, 1996). Hygienic behaviour involves the detection by worker honeybees of dead or infected brood, followed by the uncapping of the wax cell and the removal of the larva or pupa (Arathi et al., 2000). [1] The proportion of highly hygienic colonies, defined as those that remove >95% of dead brood within 48 h, is normally only around 10–12% in natural populations (Oldroyd, 1996; Spivak and Gilliam, 1998; Waite et al., 2003a). However, this proportion can be increased through artificial colony-level selection (Spivak and Gilliam, 1998). This starts by screening a large number of colonies to detect the most hygienic colonies, from which queens and/or drones are reared. A hygienic line of colonies are then obtained after at least four generations by crossing drones and daughter queens from the most hygienic colonies using either artificial insemination or natural mating (Palacio et al., 2000; Spivak and Reuter, 2001).

Although colony-level selection has proved successful, the response to selection could potentially be improved if the breeding programme also included intracolony selection. The rationale behind this is that much of the genetic heterogeneity in a honeybee colony comes about because mother queens mate with multiple males (Estoup et al., 1994; Tarpy et al., 2004). The queens use sperm from these males randomly (Franck et al., 1999, 2002), and so colonies consist of many distinct genetic lineages (patrilines) that are the offspring of different fathers. Hygienic behaviour is behaviourally dominant, meaning that a colony has a hygienic colony-level phenotype even if only a small proportion of workers are hygienic (Arathi et al., 2000). *Thus, a colony with only one or a few hygienic patrilines would be hygienic*. As a result, the majority of daughter queens reared from a hygienic colony may themselves be of non-hygienic genotypes, significantly reducing the effectiveness of a breeding programme in terms of the response that can be obtained in one generation of selection. A breeding programme that also incorporates intracolony selection by selectively using queens from hygienic patrilines could thus be advantageous, especially at the start of a breeding programme when unselected colonies contain considerable variation for the trait of interest."
Multi-level selection for hygienic behaviour in honeybees
J A Pérez-Sato1,2, N Châline1,3, S J Martin1, W O H Hughes1 and F L W Ratnieks1,4
http://www.nature.com/hdy/journal/v102/n6/full/hdy200920a.html

[1] In the document the references are links to the footnoted fuller references, which supply links to originating documents, which, as is often the case, lead to closed publishers. However I found this one by googling the title, and will post separately.

Mike [UK]


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*

Abstract
"Hygienic behaviour performed by middle-aged worker bees is an important intranidal task in colonies of the honey bee Apis mellifera (L.). It comprises detecting diseased brood in the larval and pupal stages and removing all such infected brood, thereby decreasing the incidence of infection. Hygienic behaviour consists of two task-components: uncapping cells and removing the cell contents. The aim of this study was to observe bees performing hygienic behaviour to determine their age at performance of the behaviour and to describe their behavioural repertoire. The bees performing hygienic behaviour were middle-aged bees, younger than foragers. In the colonies where the behaviours of individual bees were observed, all bees performing the hygienic behaviour were seen to exhibit both the components, though at different frequencies. One behavioural class performed the task of uncapping cells at higher frequencies than the task of removing cell contents, while another class performed both tasks to the same extent. While these two classes had higher frequencies of the tasks comprising the hygienic behaviour but lower frequencies of other common behaviours in their repertoire, a third class of bees included those that performed all behaviours in their repertoire at similar frequencies. There was no difference in the ages of the bees in these three behavioural classes. These results suggest that there is no evidence of task partitioning among bees performing the hygienic behaviour. The segregation observed could, however, be based on their response thresholds to the stimulus and/or on their ability to discriminate the various cues emanating from the dead brood."

Discussion
Hygienic behaviour is an important intranidal task in a honey bee colony and is
performed by middle!aged bees[ The above estimates of the ages of bees performing
hygienic behaviour con_rm that these bees have brood!rearing experience but have
not yet begun foraging[ It is evident from the time activity budgets of the bees
performing hygienic behaviour that 31) of their time is spent in the two com!
ponents of hygienic behaviour\ while in the remaining time the bees are engaged
in common behaviours such as walking\ autogrooming and inspecting cell contents[
The common behaviours described above are known to be the main components
of the behavioural repertoire of middle!aged bees "Kolmes 0874^ Seeley 0884#[
Hygienic behaviour is exhibited by a small percentage "07)# of the bees in the
colony[ A similarly small percentage of bees that are task specialists has also been
reported for bees performing undertaking\ the removal of dead adult bees from
the colony[ Bees performing the hygienic behaviour did not perform undertaking
but were seen to drop the dead brood they pulled out to the base of the colony
which would then be cleaned out by other worker bees "Arathi\ pers[ obs[#[ Under!
takers are members of the forager age class\ unlike the bees performing the hygienic
behaviour\ and were also found to constitute a small subset of colony workers]
about 01) at any time "Sakagami 0842^ Visscher 0872#[ It is interesting\ however\
to note here that the small percentage of bees found performing the hygienic
behaviour in this study is despite the fact that these colonies were selected for
hygienic behaviour[ The bees in these colonies should be homozygous for the
character and all of them are therefore equally likely to perform the behaviour[
The small percentage of bees that performed the hygienic behaviour\ however\
performed both components of it and did not show any evidence of clear task
partitioning between uncapping cells and removing cell contents

[...]

Though the performance of hygienic behaviour is also brief in tenure\ it is very
unlikely that learning is not an important component[ On the contrary\ given that
the behaviour is performed for a brief time in a worker bee|s life and is associated
with handling diseased brood\ it is likely that its performance becomes more
e.cient through learning[ Learning could lead to better detection of the stimulus
with continued exposure "Masterman et al[ 1999#[ Earlier experiments by Trump
et al[ "0856# proposed that bees do not learn from their association with other
hygienic bees\ but just being in the same hive as other hygienic bees may not have
the same e}ect as actively performing the behaviour[ Uncapping cells with dead or
diseased brood could result in bees performing these tasks more e.ciently

Ethology of Hygienic Behaviour in the Honey Bee Apis mellifera L[
"Hymenoptera] Apidae#] Behavioural Repertoire of Hygienic Bees
H[ S[ Arathi\ I[ Burns + M[ Spivak
http://www.beelab.umn.edu/prod/grou...es/documents/article/cfans_article_436807.pdf


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## ForrestB (May 26, 2013)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*



Adam Foster Collins said:


> Is it fair to ever expect bees to "boil out of their boxes" with no treatments, and minimal feeding?


That is precisely what Tim Ives's colonies do. 400 lbs average production per hive. No feeding. No treating. 8% annual losses.

Obviously it can be done - but he himself said it took a lot of experience and a lot of time to weed out weak colonies before he began to have success. I am not treating myself, but I am a patient person and if it takes five years to see solid results, so be it. 

I don't engage in the treat-don't treat nasty "discussions" that happen on this forum, if someone else does it a different way, so what... but there is ample proof that you can get outstanding results from untreated colonies and if I am not doing so at the moment, it is only because I haven't learned how to yet.


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*

Good post Forrest.

And Mike, thanks for getting serious and doing the work, I wanted to see the context.

Unfortunately, the context is hygiene. It is pretty much established now that general hygiene alone is not going to defeat mites. Varroa specific hygiene has a better, but still tenuous chance.

So nothing you have presented backs you claim that "only a few mite resistant patrilines are needed to make a hive mite resistant". And as a breeder, simple and amateurish as my work may be, I have not found your claim to be the true.

Sorry, and I can see how you got confused. But the naked truth is, your claim is unsubstantiated, and does not appear to be in any of the claimed "scientific literature".


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## sqkcrk (Dec 10, 2005)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*



ForrestB said:


> That is precisely what Tim Ives's colonies do. 400 lbs average production per hive.


Does that mean that he has some hives which produce an average of 400 lbs over a number of seasons? Or does that mean over all of his production hives he averages 400 lbs of honey?

Does Tim have some hives that produce over 400 lbs of honey? What is the Guiness World Record for honey production?


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*

The cryptic nature of some of Tim's posts here on Beesource, make it impossible to determine if his seasonal 400 lb plus average is a true average, or an average of his best hives, or a world record. He needs to talk here more. 

I did ask him, but the answer was not so clear cut as it included calculations on how much it would have taken to produce x lbs of wax, and other things, arriving at a theoretical figure, which would have been more than the honey actually harvested.

A straight answer, ie x honey, in the tank, from y number of hives that are not just the star performers only, would have been helpful.


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## sqkcrk (Dec 10, 2005)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*

I love it when someone says "I had a hive that made 200 lbs average." WChat the heck does that mean?


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## cg3 (Jan 16, 2011)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*

I have been both intrigued and confused by Tim's posts. I, too, wish he would write a blow-by-blow breakdown of his methods and results. But I think I understand his reluctance to post here. Few enjoy being called a liar.


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## jim lyon (Feb 19, 2006)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*



sqkcrk said:


> Does that mean that he has some hives which produce an average of 400 lbs over a number of seasons? Or does that mean over all of his production hives he averages 400 lbs of honey?
> 
> Does Tim have some hives that produce over 400 lbs of honey? What is the Guiness World Record for honey production?


We can only guess. The relevant facts are what is your investment in time and equipment and how much production do you have to show for it at the end of the season. When we figure our pounds per hive average it's on every hive that is queenright at the beginning of the main flow. Those who pick and choose which hives are honey producers and then claim an average on only those hives are only fooling themselves and attempting to fool others. From every hive that you have input costs (labor included) you should have income.


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## gmcharlie (May 9, 2009)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*

No need to guess, Tim had an extensive conversation on it, and the info was there, He runs several 3 deep hives that produce well (bet he don't get 400 this year weather has been a major issue)....

But the key is those are very select hives. if I did the numbers right about about 1/3 of his do that well. Still lots of real discussion need to decide if a single that makes 100 is better than a triple that make 300.... He is a bit cryptic about his total averages... but not unusual.


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*



Oldtimer said:


> Unfortunately, the context is hygiene. It is pretty much established now that general hygiene alone is not going to defeat mites. Varroa specific hygiene has a better, but still tenuous chance.


Its one of the most promising avenues of research and has been amply demonstrated to make a significant difference. It isn't isn't on its own enough to make the difference between colony life and 
death, but nor is anything else - health and vitality emerge from a complex of adaptive traits and characteristics. 

I think if you were genuinely interested in moving toward a design for a new attempt, at treatment free beekeeping, you'd be very interested in these things.




Oldtimer said:


> So nothing you have presented backs you claim that "only a few mite resistant patrilines are needed to make a hive mite resistant".


I'm going to agree with you that I could have written that more carefully. However, what Prof. Ratneiks says and this reference, taken together, amount to is at least highly suggestive of something close to that position. It isn't absolute, which is what you seem to want. It amounts to something like: 'the more patrilines carry the several hygeinic traits, especially vsh, the more likely it is that a colony won't fall to mite infection alone.' 

Other things help - resistance to viruses like dwv for example, general vitality, attunement to local climate and forage. 

That's a reasonable rounded picture, and a fair interpretation of the literature, and enough off-topic nit-picking. 

Mike (UK)


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*

I guess that's as near as you would ever get to saying your statement was incorrect.

Nitpicking. LOL


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## ForrestB (May 26, 2013)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*



gmcharlie said:


> Still lots of real discussion need to decide if a single that makes 100 is better than a triple that make 300.... He is a bit cryptic about his total averages... but not unusual.


I think there is no question 3 is better than 1, IF what Tim says is true - and that is that large colonies are naturally more resistant to a whole range of ills. And it would seem logical - if a strong and healthy mature colony can occupy three hive boxes, why would anyone assume that restricting them to a single would not be prejudicial? And all of Tim's comments square precisely with the writings of Oscar Perone. I for one am going to give it a try - though people in my area (northern Spain) think this is crazy. But not one of them has actually tried it for themselves. Lol.

As to the numbers, I didn't see anything that Tim said that would suggest that his definition of average is any different than mine. Though what I did undertand him to mean is that that is the average for his mature three deep hives - of which each year he splits HALF into singles. Those are essentially his nucs and he does not include those when calculating his production numbers.


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## Daniel Y (Sep 12, 2011)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*

My immediate reply to 1 that produces 300 or 3 that produce 100 each is that the 1 is better. It is one third the additional equipment needed. only one BB, Inner cover, feeder outer cover. etc etc etc. and only one hive to open and inspect. of course inspection is more difficult to impossible or insane to choose to do whichever you chose to call it.

With additional thought the advantages of 3 hives begin to come forward. More options to navigate less than stellar performance and that sort of thing.

In actual practice I would have to say I am the 3 with 100 each sort. since that is how I actually manage my bees. at least so far anyway.


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## Joseph Clemens (Feb 12, 2005)

*Re: Treatment Free "Thriving" vs. Treated "Thriving" - Is it Fair to Compare?*

I don't treat for Varroa mites, because, before I read how Varroa afflicted colonies that weren't treated, would survive two or three years, at best. Well, before I first read that statement, my hives were already more than ten years old, and I hadn't lost a single one. Now, my colonies are more than twenty years old, and the only ones I lose are the ones I sell, or the few that are still in 3-frame mating nucs, before I combine them into full-size nucs for the Winter (they are often overcome by robbing, if we've had a dry Summer). Strong 5-frame nucs, or larger colonies seem to be able to hold their own, but they sometimes have intercolony feuds over resources, which usually reduces most hives populations of older bees, but rarely results in episodes of, "robbed out" colonies.

Almost every season, here, is unique, in some way. Many times the Summer rains are not sufficient to overcome the drying effect of the Summer heat, so there is dearth. Winter rains, are, likewise, scarce. But, when there is sufficient rain, combined with, slightly cooler temperatures (90F or below), there can be nice wildflower honey flows.

In the meantime, after the bees have depleted their stores. Which can happen by September or October, I then begin feeding, a little, enough to keep them alive, until the next time the weather is right to provide more forage.

Here, Varroa seems like no problem at all. Now, chronic lack of forage, that's a problem. 

I'm not saying that Varroa isn't a deadly parasitic pest, for many beekeepers. Just that "location" seems to be of much more importance than just about any other factor.


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