# My TF experiment



## squarepeg (Jul 9, 2010)

that is an interesting story jim. were the original 18 all in one location, and what will you do with the colonies should any make it through the winter?


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## bucksbees (May 19, 2015)

What was the hive setup, and do you know if they still had the same queen?


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## fieldsofnaturalhoney (Feb 29, 2012)

jim lyon said:


> While it's an "experiment" full of flaws it does tell an interesting story.


 Which is:scratch: You can't take treated bees and stop treating them and expect them to survive?


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## Riverderwent (May 23, 2013)

jim lyon said:


> Be interesting to see how many make the spring.


Yep. And how much honey they make. The dynamics in that yard as 14 hives crashed would be interesting -- where the honey went and where the varroa went.


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## jim lyon (Feb 19, 2006)

squarepeg said:


> that is an interesting story jim. were the original 18 all in one location, and what will you do with the colonies should any make it through the winter?


Yes, all in one location. It included some of last years years breeders and builders none of which had the advantage of a spring brood break so, again, it's not an apples to apples comparison. I will definitely be taking a hard look at any survivors as potential breeders.


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## jim lyon (Feb 19, 2006)

fieldsofnaturalhoney said:


> Which is:scratch: You can't take treated bees and stop treating them and expect them to survive?


Well, essentially, yes. Do you feel I was trying to present it as something more than that?


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## squarepeg (Jul 9, 2010)

jim lyon said:


> I will definitely be taking a hard look at any survivors as potential breeders.


:thumbsup:

thanks for sharing jim, and looking forward to seeing how it plays out for you.

i know you got away from synthetic miticides some years ago. do you have a feel for what percentage of the frames in these hives might harbor any residue?


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## JSL (Sep 22, 2007)

Jim, thanks for sharing. To be fair to the TF crowd, I assume many would argue abandonment does not equal TF. Likewise, simply surviving that time period does not imply breeder material, especially since it was over such a short time period and no production was accounted for. If they were marked queens and you had some more "data" then you are headed somewhere, but right now it just sounds like a mess to clean up.


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## squarepeg (Jul 9, 2010)

jim lyon said:


> Ran ether rolls and found numbers in the mid teens and several frames of brood present.





Riverderwent said:


> The dynamics in that yard as 14 hives crashed would be interesting -- where the honey went and _where the varroa went_.


(italics mine)



JSL said:


> Likewise, simply surviving that time period does not imply breeder material...


with mite counts at many times threshold, and if the brood is relatively healthy in those hives, and if they survive and build up well coming out of winter, then i think it's fair to say that there is enough there to make a safe bet that something may well be 'special' about these colonies.

if it has anything to do with less virulent viruses and other beneficial microbiota then making as many splits as possible along with requeening from the survivors might be a good strategy.

sounds like a low tech, low risk, low cost experiment with potential to yield something valuable.

(posted with all due respect to dr. latshaw whose credentials and expertise exceed my own by a few orders of magnitude)


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## JRG13 (May 11, 2012)

I don't see it as flawed as you weren't really comparing them to anything in general. You wanted to see how well that set of hives would do and you got some answers. Mite loads can be subjective as some TF guys claim their bees carry varied loads with some in the high range but do just fine. Square kind of touched on it, if the brood and bees still look ok, you could have some virus resistance or successfully got the less virulent strain to take over. Personally I'm looking for resistance mechanisms that deal with the mites, I don't think I'd settle for bees that just lived with a fair % of infestation as I believe it's counter productive on more than one level. Which reminds me, I need to perform a few mite counts as I've identified a couple hives that may have some value but I'm not sure how high of a count they're carrying.

As far as the 'expect them to survive' statement. Well, this may be true, but the whole purpose is to find some that do. Also, I've tested more than a few 'TF' stocks and the results were pretty similar here so how do you interpret that? I ran a similar set of hives this year out of a set of 16 I purchased and had fairly similar results although I did end up treating them, ultimately losing 3 but identified 3-4 decent hives, one of which I've left untreated.


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## jim lyon (Feb 19, 2006)

JSL said:


> Jim, thanks for sharing. To be fair to the TF crowd, I assume many would argue abandonment does not equal TF. Likewise, simply surviving that time period does not imply breeder material, especially since it was over such a short time period and no production was accounted for. If they were marked queens and you had some more "data" then you are headed somewhere, but right now it just sounds like a mess to clean up.


Just relating my experience here. Some might perceive a 5 month gap in management as abandonment, that is their right, and to a degree they would be correct. I didn't start this thread to bash any style of management but rather to relate a specific experience relative to tf beekeeping. It's simply unbiased data, make of it what you will. It should also be noted that while they didn't get any care through the summer, they also weren't subjected to the pooling and trucking stresses the rest of the operation was.


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## Nordak (Jun 17, 2016)

jim lyon said:


> they also weren't subjected to the pooling and trucking stresses the rest of the operation was.


Opinions vary, but that probably helped a lot. Do you plan on leaving them stationary?


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## Cloverdale (Mar 26, 2012)

jim lyon said:


> Yes, all in one location. It included some of last years years breeders and builders none of which had the advantage of a spring brood break so, again, it's not an apples to apples comparison. I will definitely be taking a hard look at any survivors as potential breeders.


Wouldn't you have to wait at least a year or two to actually see if they are truly mite tolerant?


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## JSL (Sep 22, 2007)

jim lyon said:


> I didn't start this thread to bash any style of management but rather to relate a specific experience relative to tf beekeeping.


No, I would not think that of you Jim, you are too nice of a guy! There is just a perpetuated stereotype that abandoning hives is equivalent to TF management.
You have a real opportunity for some selection in your operations, but it would take a little fine tuning.


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## JSL (Sep 22, 2007)

squarepeg said:


> (posted with all due respect to dr. latshaw whose credentials and expertise exceed my own by a few orders of magnitude)


Squarepeg, you are too kind, always glad to see when you chime in!


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## FlowerPlanter (Aug 3, 2011)

http://www.apidologie.org/articles/apido/pdf/2006/05/m6039.pdf

I hope you have similar results. Good Luck!


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## clyderoad (Jun 10, 2012)

jim lyon said:


> Just relating my experience here. Some might perceive a 5 month gap in management as abandonment, that is their right, and to a degree they would be correct. I didn't start this thread to bash any style of management but rather to relate a specific experience relative to tf beekeeping. It's simply unbiased data, make of it what you will. It should also be noted that while they didn't get any care through the summer, they also weren't subjected to the pooling and trucking stresses the rest of the operation was.


You have to start somewhere and that's what you have done. Most accounts I read the poster is lucky to keep 18 hives never mind
use 18 for experimental purposes. 
I'm sure it's not the first time for you searching for a better bee .
Good.
I too left some hives unmanaged but lost them all by the second year. Twice I did this with 6 and then 8 colonies. No honey, and no bees were the result.
Since then I have brought in Russians, mite biters and VSH queens to live side by side with my Long Island bees. I keep raising open mated queens hoping things align themselves from the variety of bees I have. I choose from the queens that express the traits I want, take it from there, and go for it. It's a work in progress. 
Thanks for the post Jim, finally a real life 'that's what I have done, let's see where it goes' account.


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## beepro (Dec 31, 2012)

Out of 12 colonies only 2 survived. Out of this 2 many are born from.
With 12 hives there was enough population to ran a tf experiment. I rather don't
wait for 12 or 18 hives to do one. If in this situation I would bring in 10 more hives
to this location and make splits from the 4 surviving hives for the 10 hives to make their
own open mated queens. The plan is to make more survivor hives dominating this yard.
Going into their 2nd and 3rd year you will see whether or not they are the survivors.


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## Fusion_power (Jan 14, 2005)

20 years ago, 1 in 1000 survived. Today 4 in 18 or about 25% survive. Presume that 3 of those 4 show little or no mite resistance. That still leaves a distinct possibility of 1 that is worth breeding from. You could also give all 4 of them a couple of frames of drone comb and use them as drone source colonies. Either way, there are possibilities.

Jim, will you be raising queens in TX this year starting sometime in February?


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## Cloverdale (Mar 26, 2012)

There was a very good discussion on bee-l on this subject, the difference between mite tolerant and mite resistant etc. and the goal being to "create" non-treat bee's. Maybe check out the archives there on bee-l, there was MUCH information regarding this subject. What I basically took from that discussion that I could understand is the difficulty in keeping these characteristics ongoing in an apiary especially ones that we keep with our style hives, including TB. Tom Seeley and his Arnot Forest bees is a good example of what is right with these bees being treatment free, their location being high in a tree, colonies being approximately ½ mile apart etc. Even he panicked somewhat when a Beekeeper put hives near this place thinking "mite bombs". I believe in location location location. And there will always bee new Beekeepers who want to be treatment free from the get-go and have these mite bombs within 5 miles of your apiary, hence the location being important. Again try and have a look at this discussion on bee-l.


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## squarepeg (Jul 9, 2010)

randy oliver alluded to spending his next series of articles on this topic, should be very interesting.


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## Riverderwent (May 23, 2013)

The "mite bomb" effect is what signifies the importance of any of the original 18 hives that do survive coming out of winter. It concentrates the pressure on the survivors so that you can identify the very strongest either due to tolerance or resistance (or possibly the lottery winner of both tolerance and existence). I suspect that Mr. Lyon started with bees that were relatively strong for commercial bees. I would want a queen from one of those that survives this winter.


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## Fusion_power (Jan 14, 2005)

Resistance: the ability of an organism to resist the effects of a disease, pest, or parasite.
Grooming, VSH, brood breaks, and mite entombment are examples of resistance. 

Tolerance: the ability of an organism to deal with the effects of a disease, pest, or parasite.
Expanding population faster than the disease or pest is an example of tolerance. I am placing DWV-b which is less virulent to bees in the tolerance category for now though in some ways, it is neither resistance nor tolerance. It is an adaptive mechanism that allows both the honeybee and the virus to co-exist.

I've been working on the way I express these concepts because it is important to clearly differentiate between them.


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## Nordak (Jun 17, 2016)

SnickeringBear said:


> Resistance: the ability of an organism to resist the effects of a disease, pest, or parasite.
> Grooming, VSH, brood breaks, and mite entombment are examples of resistance.
> 
> Tolerance: the ability of an organism to deal with the effects of a disease, pest, or parasite.
> ...


Understanding the differences from a definitional standpoint is one thing. How do you observe the differences? Is there a mite threshold that suggests that at some level the hive must be exhibiting more tolerance than resistance? How do you gauge the difference? My guess is that any decent outcome having to do with TF bees thriving there is most likely combinations of both tolerance and resistance at play.


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## JRG13 (May 11, 2012)

Nordak, you'd have to look at the mite populations and what the bees are doing to either keep them in check or not. There's a few guys that used to be on beesource that run TF, lose a lot of colonies every year but rebound in Spring with splits. They always talk of how some colonies just carry high miteloads but it never seems to affect them, this is what a tolerance trait would look like to me. Resistance would be a colony that keeps mite levels low by actively doing something to disrupt their reproduction.


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## Nordak (Jun 17, 2016)

JRG13 said:


> Nordak, you'd have to look at the mite populations and what the bees are doing to either keep them in check or not. There's a few guys that used to be on beesource that run TF, lose a lot of colonies every year but rebound in Spring with splits. They always talk of how some colonies just carry high miteloads but it never seems to affect them, this is what a tolerance trait would look like to me. Resistance would be a colony that keeps mite levels low by actively doing something to disrupt their reproduction.


I have seen both in my apiary, and has often fluctuated within a given hive. How do you assess colonies that are bombarded by horizontal transmission and survive that previously exhibited low counts? I just mean that there are so many dynamics involved with mites, transmission and the bees response that it seems a lot of the observational aspects would be hard to categorize. It think some guess work might be involved on the part of the casual beek like myself. All I know is if it works, keep on keeping.


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## Cloverdale (Mar 26, 2012)

squarepeg said:


> randy oliver alluded to spending his next series of articles on this topic, should be very interesting.


That should be an eye opener for Beekeepers, I can't wait to read it! He was in on this discussion too on bee-l as I am sure you know.


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## Cloverdale (Mar 26, 2012)

Nordka.."I just mean that there are so many dynamics involved with mites, transmission and the bees response that it seems a lot of the observational aspects would be hard to categorize."

I agree, very involved and difficult to define what is what. That's why I am a good student for now.


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## JRG13 (May 11, 2012)

Nordak said:


> I have seen both in my apiary, and has often fluctuated within a given hive. How do you assess colonies that are bombarded by horizontal transmission and survive that previously exhibited low counts? I just mean that there are so many dynamics involved with mites, transmission and the bees response that it seems a lot of the observational aspects would be hard to categorize. It think some guess work might be involved on the part of the casual beek like myself. All I know is if it works, keep on keeping.


I think you'd have to monitor monthly or maybe bi weekly. If the counts go from 1-2% to 15% you know something happened.


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## Nordak (Jun 17, 2016)

JRG13 said:


> I think you'd have to monitor monthly or maybe bi weekly. If the counts go from 1-2% to 15% you know something happened.


True. Point being, what was that something? Anyway, don't want to hijack Mr. Lyon's thread here. Just thinking out loud. Looking forward to checking out Randy Oliver's upcoming articles. Thanks for the discussion.


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## Nordak (Jun 17, 2016)

Cloverdale said:


> I agree, very involved and difficult to define what is what. That's why I am a good student for now.


:thumbsup:

If I challenge answers, it's me trying to learn and challenge myself. I'm fascinated with this aspect of beekeeping. I appreciate the patience of those who give their knowledge freely.


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## jim lyon (Feb 19, 2006)

SnickeringBear said:


> Jim, will you be raising queens in TX this year starting sometime in February?


We have been raising queen cells for ourselves and a few other commercial operations for a number of years starting around the first week in March. Between that and our nucing operation we pretty much "max out" our time so I hesitate to go looking for more customers though we do typically graft a few more than needed on a daily basis as an operating cushion.


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## lharder (Mar 21, 2015)

I think it would be a good thing if Jim brought his experience and insight to a bit of TF in his operation. I think he would do a good job at providing context and some objectivity to the thing. Have any more plans for some more systematic exploration of the subject?


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## jim lyon (Feb 19, 2006)

It turns out my report in another thread of the death of the last of my tf survivors was greatly exaggerated. I made a quick check of the hives a couple of months ago, seeing only a few adult shb's scurrying about under the lids and not wanting to take the time to clean up any messes at the time, I pronounced them dead. Wrong! Turns out 3 were still very much alive including a darker queen that was one of my best breeders from last year and has in the past 6 weeks exploded into a strong double hive. Planning on doing considerable grafting off of her again this year and taking special note of her prodigy......stayed tuned.


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## squarepeg (Jul 9, 2010)

very cool, many thanks for the update jim.


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## lharder (Mar 21, 2015)

Glad something of interest resulted. I hope you find some time to dabble in TF some more Jim.


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## jim lyon (Feb 19, 2006)

Its been a pretty remarkable "winter" here in east Texas and no doubt these hives greatly benefitted from the summer dearth followed by a nice little fall Goldenrod flow followed by a winter that never really happened and the best early spring buildup I have ever experienced down here. But, hey, survival is survival and I would be foolish not to take a hard look at these hives particularly since one was one of our prime breeders from last year.


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## lharder (Mar 21, 2015)

I on the other hand had a hard winter and lots of losses with my 2nd year hives. Looking back I think some PPB may have contributed. Some methods need to be altered.

I do have one nice 2nd year survivor cluster though, more than a medium box packed with bees. And I have one 3rd winter survivor going strong again this early spring. I think the cream is rising to the top. Luckily my nucs are doing much better.


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## Juhani Lunden (Oct 3, 2013)

lharder said:


> I on the other hand had a hard winter and lots of losses with my 2nd year hives. Looking back I think some PPB may have contributed. Some methods need to be altered.
> 
> I do have one nice 2nd year survivor cluster though, more than a medium box packed with bees. And I have one 3rd winter survivor going strong again this early spring. I think the cream is rising to the top. Luckily my nucs are doing much better.


It is always sad to hear about losses. And the more joyfull to hear about hives living.

I just looked a TV document of the American Manhigh Project from the 1950´s (and earlier). In the end one of the test pilots, Captain Joseph W. Kittinger, said that the project is largely forgotten, but it was an important step and forerunner of the Nasa Mercury Project. 


Made me think about this TF pioneering. Hopefully something comes out of it, some day.

There are many things which make me feel more convinced, are of them is that bigger beekeepers, like Jim Lyon, are getting interested and into action. 


A beekeeping friend phoned me yesterday and he also made me more convinced that something needs to be done. He makes three treatments in a year, April, August and late November, but despite of this extra carefull work he has serious troubles in some yards every year. 
He blamed viruses getting worse all the time.

My hives are all alive. They managed to make a record early cleansing flight, but now more snow and temp down to -16C.


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