# Treatment-Free, Summer 2013, How's it going?



## sqkcrk (Dec 10, 2005)

You will never know how far you can really go until you have gone too far.


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## tsmullins (Feb 17, 2011)

I have 13 colonies that are treatment free. Six of those were overwintered colonies. My other seven colonies are from six splits and one swarm. The swarm may possibly came from one of my hives. My best overwintered hive has two ten frame capped medium supers on it right now, and third partial medium. This is a third year untreated hive. 

All of my bees are local bees on foundationless frames. 

Shane


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## squarepeg (Jul 9, 2010)

this is my fourth season keeping bees and i now have 12 full size colonies and 15 nucs that have not received any mite treatments.

i lost one hive last fall that was heavily infested with mites, but most of my losses have been the result of queen failure as evidenced by laying workers in late winter, (and perhaps secondary to varroa). all of those losses occured last winter after having zero losses the first two winters. overwintering the nucs this year will give me the resources to prevent these kind of losses going forward.

my bees were obtained from a supplier that started 16 years ago with feral cut outs and has never treated. so these bees are derived from locally adapted feral survivors, and i am blessed to live in an area with an abundance of natural forage almost year round.

one thing i have noticed is that they have been naturally giving themselves a brood break, either by swarming or by supercedure.

i am still harvesting honey after a very productive spring. the hives that did not swarm are easily yielding 120 lbs. surplus even after drawing out a super or two of foundation. the ones that swarmed are yielding more like 60 lbs. and they didn't draw out much wax for me. 

i am happy with the productivity and workability of these treatment free bees, but they do like to swarm. now that i am accumulating enough drawn comb and getting a feel for swarm prevention (which means i need to not let them stop moving up into the next box) i think i can get my average up to 100+ lbs. and still leave plenty for the bees.

we haven't gotten to our fall flow yet, but i'll be leaving some of the spring honey plus whatever they store in the fall. i use a single deep and will be leaving somewhere between one and two mediums of honey for winter. in addition to not using treatments, i haven't fed syrup for over two years.

i'll be taking mite counts about mid-summer, after i finish with the honey harvest.


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## gmcharlie (May 9, 2009)

I run almost 100, as for treatment free, great so far this year. Lots of requeening going on.... without my help. Mites are at a VERY low level right now. between requeen and dearth shutting off brood.


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## D Semple (Jun 18, 2010)

About 20 boomers, 10 ok, and another 10 small, all tf.

Our main flow started about a month late but is going strong right now. Boomers are working on 4th & 5th med. supers. Normally are main flow is about over, but we have had timely rains and white clover just started blooming so I hope we get 3 or 4 more weeks of flow. 

Will be doing mite counts end of July.

Don


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## wissler (Jan 27, 2012)

Into 3rd year treatment free. No hive losses, and started the year with 4 hives that made it through the winter all with unlimited brood nest (3-4) deeps. With swarms and splits up to 10 hives now. Not sure of mite counts. Never have done a mite count. Keeping brood nest open and running small cell foundation or small cell starter strips seems to be working for me so far. Not feeding at all during the winter or spring, which means leaving enough stores of honey and pollen on the hive to get them through the winter.


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## Mosherd1 (Apr 17, 2011)

I stopped treating in 2010. In 2011 I purchased a pure VSH breeder queen from Tom Glenn. The winter of 2011-2012 I did not lose a single hive (except for two nucs). I think at that point I had around 9 or 10 hives. I grew from swarms and splits to about 15 hives in the Summer of 2012. I did a poor job of preparing them for winter last September due to some family issues. I did not wrap them and took off my supers too late and starvation was a problem for me. I came out of winter with 7 hives, of which 5 were on the weaker side and 2 were great. All 7 have grown very strong to now and are doing a great job putting honey away. When the flow ends in about a week or two I plan on breaking up 2 of my weaker production hives to start new nucs. I need to do a sticky board check for mite levels but I am waffling as to if I should treat with MAQS this August. The sticky board will tell me that I guess. 

One internal struggle that I am finding myself in is whether I should graft from my strongest hive now (which is the strongest because it was a swarm last year thus newer queen) or one that has survived for a few years but might not be as string because the queen is older. Good luck!


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## Solomon Parker (Dec 21, 2002)

For those of you not familiar with me, I've been treatment-free for 10 years (is this an AA meeting or what?)

I currently have somewhere in the range of 28 colonies and nine nucs. I use no method of mite control.

Due to the weather this year, queen rearing and nuc building got delayed. A bunch of my nuc customers cancelled on me leaving me with too many hives. The dearth started before the last nucs could get built up, so they're going out today to requeen some other hives. Still sold more nucs than last year. Already I've had to combine a bunch of nucs to make new colonies, and that process probably isn't over. It's not what I'd like to be doing. I have too many hives, I like to go into winter with 25, so it's a waste of queens.

It was a good year, but it could have been so much better had everything worked out as planned. Snow on May 1st is ridiculous. At some point I am going to have to harvest honey, there's a bunch of that out there too.


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## Adam Foster Collins (Nov 4, 2009)

Solomon,

Can you talk a bit about your decision to go treatment free in the first place? What was your experience prior to that, and what was your thought process around deciding to go treatment free? Did you transition slowly? Did you use any non-chemical approach to mite control, and then gradually eliminate that as well, or were have you not used any mite control at all for the entire 10 years?

Thanks,

Adam


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## Solomon Parker (Dec 21, 2002)

Adam, I'd be happy to.

My father had acquired a hive when I was in about sixth grade or so and lacking treatment, it died of a massive mite infestation the first chance it got. So when I started beekeeping on my own shortly after graduating high school, I was very eager to find some other method. Being the optimist I am, I followed the work of Dee Lusby after finding her here on Beesource at the time. She and Michael Bush and Dennis Murrell and a few others were the only ones even trying it and believe it or not, there were more naysayers then ("They don't make wolf resistant sheep!"). But that optimism pushed me to follow the example of someone who succeeded in doing what I wanted to do. So the decision was made before I ever got bees. And I followed the example to the best of my ability.

In the runup, I did make some hives with screened bottom boards, but only 6 or 7 of the twenty had them. After the winnowing process, the ones with the screened bottom boards were not the ones that survived and I eventually came to the view that firstly, they don't work, and secondly, the bees shouldn't need them so why provide them. That's all that I ever used unless you count small cell foundation which the studies say doesn't work so it can't be a viable method, I'm just spending extra money buying a gimmick I don't need, right?

I have never used any of the common (or any other) of the methods of mite control. I have never used powdered sugar, food grade mineral oil, any essential oil, grease patties, brood breaks, drone brood, beetle traps, or anything else that I can't think of. Surveys show they don't work anyway. So as far as I am concerned, the answer is no, I have never used any form of mite control, and most certainly not one accepted as effective. What I do is simple in the saying, but not so simple in the doing. I keep bees like diseases don't exist. I increase from the good performers, the gentle, and the living.

See, the thing is, nature does make wolf resistant sheep. They have big curly horns and wander up cliffs and mountainsides where wolves aren't so comfortable. The wooly tasty sheep are the ones that get eaten all the time because by selective breeding for production and gentleness and not also for wolf resistance, we have severely reduced their ability to survive their predators. And we treat that problem by trying to kill the predators. Remind you of anything?


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## Adam Foster Collins (Nov 4, 2009)

Thanks Solomon,

I think I'm heading now on a similar track. I'm focusing on wintering nucs, and I guess it is in line with what you have termed "expansion model" beekeeping. My feeling is that if you have enough colonies in enough different "states" (ie nucs, captured swarms, overwintered production, splits, cut-outs, etc) then you can ride out the losses and replace. At the same time, you have to produce queens from your best.

But I really feel there is a "sweet spot" somewhere in terms of colony numbers, and it isn't two or three. I feel like you've got to have quite a few colonies to stay afloat and moving forward in some kind of breeding program, and I haven't found what that is yet. 

Adam


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## NewJoe (Jul 1, 2012)

second year.

8 colonies presently......one that was over-wintered, the rest were splits or swarm captures. no treatments at all. The one overwintered hive has been split and then swarmed once....they are booming and all the rest are growing nicely.


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## Solomon Parker (Dec 21, 2002)

Adam Foster Collins said:


> I feel like you've got to have quite a few colonies to stay afloat


Adam, I wholeheartedly agree. I never reached that equilibrium because I was headed to 25 colonies and by the time I got there I had already achieved consistent low losses. Now is the time for a shift in focus, toward better performing colonies and more efficient nuc production. This year has certainly taught me to hone my queen rearing skills and what things are important and which are vital in my method.

My focus in teaching is the number of colonies it takes to stay afloat as a backyard beekeeper. I recommend at least five. What it takes to sustain a breeding program, I don't know. I'm not sure I consider what I do breeding. I just multiply the best and replace the worst. I'm not trying to do anything really specific, more of a general improvement.


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## Adam Foster Collins (Nov 4, 2009)

I will have to see how things go, but I feel that I want to work toward a breeding program. To me, the goal is reaching a place where I have bees thriving in balance with mites in my region. I've been told it's not possible, but I feel like trying anyway.

I feel that with enough colonies, you can stay operational and treatment-free even with bees who can't survive mites. By splitting, collecting swarms and cut-outs and wintering nucs, you'll survive, because you have enough colonies, with mites at different points in their advancement - meaning different bee-to-mite ratios.

One can likely live in that place, but I feel that if you continue selectively breeding on top of that, and perhaps making some effort into creating some isolated mating yards, you can make progress until the bees are thriving in balance with the mites.

Naive?

I know, I know... Just SAYING "treatment free" makes you a naive dreamer...(insert music: "Lara's Theme" from Doctor Zhivago)

Adam


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## Adam Foster Collins (Nov 4, 2009)

Actually, I think the key thing to not being naive is realizing that it takes a critical mass to be able to do this. I know I'm not there yet, as my apiary did poorly without the influx of swarms and cut-outs.

Adam


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## Solomon Parker (Dec 21, 2002)

No, not at all naive. Ambitious maybe.


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## SRBrooks (Jun 24, 2012)

I have only two hives (Top-bars), an am entirely committed to treatment free. I don't do mite counts, as I won't treat for them anyway. 

One of my hives has quite a few SHB, but since the hive is so strong, I just let the bees handle them. At times I see a few bees ganging up and chasing them around. They'll get theirs.

The only hive failures I've had were when I tried a small, BackYardHive. I tried so many packages, and so many queens, but I never could get bees to agree to live in this design, and I think it may be because the hive design is very shallow from top bar to floor. But I'm probably off the subject now. 

Sondra


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

Deleted as copied


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

Solomon Parker said:


> My focus in teaching is the number of colonies it takes to stay afloat as a backyard beekeeper. I recommend at least five. What it takes to sustain a breeding program, I don't know. I'm not sure I consider what I do breeding. I just multiply the best and replace the worst. I'm not trying to do anything really specific, more of a general improvement.


If it isn't breeding then it needs another term. 'Population husbandry' would do - bit of a mouthful but it describes the key feature.

As to number of colonies needed, I think that's highly dependent on the state of the local population -presence of treating beekeepers and/or wild 'survivors'.

I continually look for new sites, seeking year-round rough forage and (likely) distance from other beekeepers. I've recently found a nice stretch of rough woodland with (at present) tons of ivy crawling with bees - and know of no local beekeepers. I think that signals a survivor presence, so I'm going to try it as a mating spot next year.

I'm in my third year, up to 34 at last count, from 7 overwintered. Most are from making increase, a handful are swarms and I did one one cut-out this year. I don't treat in any shape or manner. I'm aware its early days... Most of my stocks seem very healthy - they've had a good summer and built well.

This year I'm working harder to prepare the small nucs for winter - which means supplying comb and syrup, and doing more to keep damp out - no more ply boxes, good deep roofs, no rising damp! 

I think you have to identify the things that help, and do them in the knowledge that your bees will be better than if you hadn't. Its no different to any other sort of husbandry really, just that unlike what most people do, we nurture our own seed, and have to attend closely to the process of ensuring we do it well to give ourselves the best chance of healthy and productive stock. 

I'm thinking a lot just now about localism in beekeeping too. Local survivors will have gained, through competition, good 'knowledge' of the climate, bloom times and so on - they will be attuned. I'd like to be sure I draw on and dovetail with that - helping local bees retain their annual strategic abilities. I have to think about ways I might be messing that up. For one, I'm considering no spring feeding - though perhaps not next year as I'll be seeking to make strong increase again. 

Mike (UK)


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## JWChesnut (Jul 31, 2013)

mike bispham said:


> I'm thinking a lot just now about localism in beekeeping too. Local survivors will have gained, through competition, good 'knowledge' of the climate, bloom times and so on - they will be attuned.
> Mike (UK)


Where is the attuned local 'knowledge' stored in the bee (meta-population) brain? 

These sort of statements miss the essential evolutionary imperative of honeybees. Honeybees are successful generalists. They resist niche specialization. Many insects pursue niche specialization and become highly fragile, fragmented species. Honeybees have a very different strategy -- they use social communication to adapt to conditions, rather than hard-wired specializations. This is why the same interbreeding species is able to prosper from the Equator to the Arctic.

The "mythos" of local survivors is fundamentally an inductive reasoning error. An abstract good -- "local adaptation" is posited; and this abstraction is then promoted as a real thing. In reality, the bees have a breeding and social system designed to defeat niche specialization. The bees have higher fitness as generalists, and they are evolutionary successful and long-lasting because they have resisted the siren-song on local niche specialization.


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## Rader Sidetrack (Nov 30, 2011)

opcorn:

I look forward to more _JWC _posts. :thumbsup: :thumbsup:


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

JWChesnut said:


> Where is the attuned local 'knowledge' stored in the bee (meta-population) brain?


There's food for thought here JW, thank you. I'd thought of 'local adaptiveness' as being stored in a similar way to regional predispitions. Obviously ( I suppose) this would entail 'genetic storage'. 

There is no doubt that there is a local pattern to blooming seasons in many places, and those colonies that are well aligned with nectar and pollen supplies in terms of build up and population maintenance will, all else being equal, do better than those that are poorly aligned. Perhaps that is the only mechanism in play, and perhaps I'm overestimating it. But I still think its sensible to try to allow my bees to find their own place in the nectar season - and stimulative spring feeding will undoubtedly - to my way of thinking - mess with that.



JWChesnut said:


> Honeybees have a very different strategy -- they use social communication to adapt to conditions, rather than hard-wired specializations. This is why the same interbreeding species is able to prosper from the Equator to the Arctic.


Its a good point but... races from different climatic settings are known to have different spring building and supper population strategies. That fact supports my way of thinking.



JWChesnut said:


> The "mythos" of local survivors is fundamentally an inductive reasoning error. An abstract good -- "local adaptation" is posited; and this abstraction is then promoted as a real thing.


Not so fast. The notion of 'local survivors' tends to refer to strains that have developed resistance to varroa through natural selection. Its no 'mythos', and while the theroy may have been born as inductive reasoning, it is now scientific, empirical fact. We seek out feral genetics for that reason. 



JWChesnut said:


> In reality, the bees have a breeding and social system designed to defeat niche specialization. The bees have higher fitness as generalists, and they are evolutionary successful and long-lasting because they have resisted the siren-song on local niche specialization.


I think you are right here - but to reason (inductively) from this position to the notion that there is no manner of regional or local adaptation is wrong. Honeybees do resist niche specialisation, but competition may fairly expected to bring about local as well as regional attunement to food sources. The former is at present, I agree (as far as I know) an inductively reasoned notion, but it has strong grounds. Its certainly no logic fallacy - its a straightfoward application of basic evolutionary theory.

Mike (UK)


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## JWChesnut (Jul 31, 2013)

Mike (UK)
Consider this: The overwhelming number of species that have evolved are now extinct, dead, no-longer extant.
We tend to think of evolution as an "optimization" scheme always selecting an improved condition. This is easy with the examples of perfect mimicry in the insect world, and spectacularly complex mating systems. It is incorrect to think of evolution as always perfecting -- instead it is messy and wasteful.

Most evolution produces fragile and static dead ends. The experiment is a failure. The species blinks out. We often conceptualize fitness as a neat bell curve with an optimum peak; however, in practice, their are multiple dips and bumps, and animals get stuck in some local minimum trap, a circular whirlpool that doesn't add fitness but is impossible to escape from.

Honeybees are long extant with a very highly developed breeding system. Their key adaptation is for species stability. They combine this with a social system that is general, flexible, and highly communicative. 

The impulse to specialize and confine the bees is counter to their core evolutionary imperative. It is a misreading of the species. The great success of the "Italian" bee is not because it perfectly adapted to Tuscany or the Piedmont, but because its selection has been directed by humans to emphasize brooding over swarming. In the US, the bees with the greatest overall fitness are the mutts with mixed genotypes, and the greatest diversity of fathers for the workers. Instinctual behavior is differently expressed by workers with different fathers, a successful colony generates behavioral castes for this variation and uses its carefully preserved, universal social communication to direct the hormonally diverse castes.

Rather than narrowing your genotype, you want to expand it. That is what bees are trying to do throughout their evolution, and it is demonstrably better husbandry.


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

JWChesnut said:


> Mike (UK)
> Consider this: The overwhelming number of species that have evolved are now extinct, dead, no-longer extant.


JW,

This notion comes up often, to what end I'm never sure. But it usually fails to take account of a several key factors. First, there have been periodic mass extinctions caused by massive physcal changes - asteroid strikes, supervolcanic eruptions or a combination of the two being the chief culprits. Second, many of the now extinct species have evolved into new species. They died out because evolution improved them for current conditions and their decendents took over. 

All of which, as I say, is not especially relevant as far as I can see. The honeybee has been around, by most accounts, for 20 thousand thousand years, and that's not a bad duration in species terms. It has specialised regionally. And almost certainly one of the things that makes it robust in evoltionary terms is the ability to adapt to changing conditions on a local basis.



JWChesnut said:


> We tend to think of evolution as an "optimization" scheme always selecting an improved condition. This is easy with the examples of perfect mimicry in the insect world, and spectacularly complex mating systems. It is incorrect to think of evolution as always perfecting -- instead it is messy and wasteful.


That depend on your point of view - indeed whether you think it is useful or legitimate take any such view. Evolution is a process. The 'waste' is a necessary part of the process. It brings about not just remarkable but beautiful things - close to miraculaous wonders.

These are just subjective reactions. 



JWChesnut said:


> Most evolution produces fragile and static dead ends. The experiment is a failure. The species blinks out.


See above - the picture is far more complex. Too complex to easily quantify. What you express is, like what I express, a subjective observation. Nothing more.



JWChesnut said:


> We often conceptualize fitness as a neat bell curve with an optimum peak; ...


We can legitimately do that. We can locate data and display it in a manner that supplies a neat curve. It all depends how we want to gather and treat the data to be displayed. However....



JWChesnut said:


> however, in practice, their are multiple dips and bumps, and animals get stuck in some local minimum trap, a circular whirlpool that doesn't add fitness but is impossible to escape from.


.... I think what you are describing is a metaphor in tended to make a point about the results of evolution.

Organisms can indeed get stuck - but given sufficient genetic diversity honeybees don't appear to be prone to that. It may be that here in Europe where honeybees are indiginous I can take a different view to you.



JWChesnut said:


> Honeybees are long extant with a very highly developed breeding system. Their key adaptation is for species stability.


I'm not sure you should label that feature 'the' key adaptation. Its a feature of their make up, and as such certainly an adaptation. But they share species stability with just about every other other insect or mammal. That's what 'species' are - stable populations.



JWChesnut said:


> They combine this with a social system that is general, flexible, and highly communicative.


I'm not sure that a 'society' composed entirely of siblings or half-siblings ought to be described as a 'society' - but lets let that pass. Your adjectives are, again, subjective views. What does it mean to say of a 'social system' that it is 'general'? How is this 'social system' 'flexible - what are the grounds for comparison with other species? 'Highly' communicative? It seems to mat while, for insects, they have considerable communication abilities, those abilities ate extremely highly specialised. You coulndn't decribe them as 'broad communicators' could you?



JWChesnut said:


> The impulse to specialize and confine the bees is counter to their core evolutionary imperative. It is a misreading of the species. The great success of the "Italian" bee is not because it perfectly adapted to Tuscany or the Piedmont, but because its selection has been directed by humans to emphasize brooding over swarming.


First: consider this: in all its evolutionary history, the honeybee has communicated in the overwhelming number of cases with other local honeybees. Its first task, to survive and thrive, has been to do that successfully. 

Second, if we are to try to draw lessons inductively from an understanding of the bee's evolved nature, we should keep a focus on its natural evolution, not its 'success' as a domestic species. 



JWChesnut said:


> In the US, the bees with the greatest overall fitness are the mutts with mixed genotypes, and the greatest diversity of fathers for the workers.


That wouldn't surprise me at all. I suspect it is the same here. 



JWChesnut said:


> Instinctual behavior is differently expressed by workers with different fathers, a successful colony generates behavioral castes for this variation and uses its carefully preserved, universal social communication to direct the hormonally diverse castes.


Hmmm I think that since evolution tends to narrow genetic diversity to those traits and qualities that work best, forming regional and local species, we ought to conclude that constantly interrupting that process wit new imports might not be a good thing.

However: stop. While this is interesting speculation, it simply doesn't have the epistemic power to supply direction for the choice: import or work with locally evolved mutts (for that's all we have now). Its a personal choice, and furthermore, a false one. We can do both.

We started by my speaking about the likelyhood of having found what I consider to be a (another) local 'survivor' hotspot, and your denying that any such thing could exist, on the basis of what has proved to be very dodgy inductive speculation. 

Here it continues to its 'logical' end:



JWChesnut said:


> Rather than narrowing your genotype, you want to expand it. That is what bees are trying to do throughout their evolution, and it is demonstrably better husbandry.


If 'better husbandry' is that which gets short term results as a domesticated animal, perhaps. That's not what I'd call 'better'. I'm looking for self sufficiency. I don't know where it has been demonstrated that a honeybee racial melting pot has created a stronger population in the long term. 

But again - if you think you need it, go for it.

My situations is: its a fair guess my mutts are a residue of native bees and imports from all over. They are melting pot as it gets. That may and may not have helped them to locate the genes that permit resistance to mites - but as and where they've found it, and maintained the ability to thrive - that is what I'm looking for. I can't think of a better place to find genetically diverse mite resistant locally adapted honeybees than in my local survivor hotspots. I don't think you have any sort of argument to put up against that.

Mike (UK)


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