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New beekeeper interested in chemical free treatment

23K views 97 replies 35 participants last post by  Futhark Farm 
#1 ·
Hello all,
I'm doing some research before my very first package of bees gets here in late April. I'd like to be able to treat them without pesticide-type chemicals, but I need advice and suggestions on how to do that.
For my purposes, I'd say the definition of "chemical free" would just be "if I can put it in my mouth without getting sick, I'm ok with putting it on my hive." Essential oils are fine, fogging with FGMO is fine, sugar dusting is fine. I just want to know if: 1) Have those of you who use/have used these treatments found them effective? 2) Does anyone have any other suggestions for "chemical free" treatments?
Thanks!
 
#4 ·
All new bee keepers are interested in chemical/natural/treatment free bee keeping. "I would rather just have healthy bees" sounds great - but it's hard to resist the dark side. The bar you are setting doesn't leave many options - powdered sugar dusting, hand picking mites, IPM and bointensive, homeopathy, dianetics, prayer, high tolerance for hive lose - that sort of thing.

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

Good luck.

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

Do that and you will at least be exposed to both the yin and yang of what you are thinking about. You're welcome.
 
#6 ·
My experience is they will be much healthier if you don't treat them. Things like essential oils and organic acids disrupt the flora and fauna of the natural system in the hive.

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

I agree I feel safer eating essential oils than eating cumaphos, but why mess up the balance of the hive?
 
#11 ·
"if I can put it in my mouth without getting sick, I'm ok with putting it on my hive." Essential oils are fine, fogging with FGMO is fine, sugar dusting is fine. Thanks!
There are plenty of essential oils that are a skin and eye irritating, caustic, and toxic if not down-right poisonous.

Just because something is perceived as “natural" doesnt make it safe.
 
#13 · (Edited)
cg3, thanks for the tip. I'll do some research on formic and oxalic acids.
Rusty Hills Farms, thanks for the advice on bee species. The bees I'm getting will be Carniolans. I picked them because I read that they survive winters better then Italians. I didn't know they were resistant to mites and diseases too.
 
#16 ·
Rusty Hills Farms, thanks for the advice on bee species. The bees I'm getting will be Carniolans. I picked them because I read that they survive winters better then Italians. I didn't know they were resistant to mites and diseases too.
I don't know what scale of beekeeping you are planning, but you can incorporate a couple of hives of VSH queens along with your Carnies. Then raise a few queens from the Carnies and make sure you have plenty of VSH drones to mate them. Or vice versa. That way you get the best of both strains and have a really good chance of hives with some nicely resistant workers.

HTH

Rusty
 
#14 ·
#15 ·
Look at it this way. as was told to me by the head apiarist in my state.

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

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

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

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

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

Just a few things to think about


There's a LOT that goes into it. the best thing is to go around and talk to as many successful bee keepers you can and make your opinion and decisions from what you learn.
 
#18 ·
Look at it this way. as was told to me by the head apiarist in my state.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Very few commercial beekeepers are in a position to take this sort of risk, or even consider it as a possibility, as I learned to my sorrow in a thread on treatment free beekeeping over on the commercial forum. But this past winter, some very highly regarded beekeepers have reported horrific losses in spite of treating, so some different approach is clearly needed. In my opinion, sideliners and devoted hobbyists might be in the best position to create the bees of the future... but I doubt if those bees are going to appear as a result of treating diseases and pests with the sort of stopgap, soon-to-be-ineffective treatments we've tried so far.
 
#17 ·
When I start gardening in the spring and throughout the summer, I'll apply a spray of onion, pepper, and garlic to my plants to kill the tomato worms and aphids and such. I don't like using a lot of the commercial pesticides but the spray I make works well and kills or eliminates the bugs that would kill my plants.
I guess I'm looking for a bit of the same sort of thing here. I'm not against treating bees. I suppose I'm not even really against chemicals but, because I'm going to be eating the honey the bees produce, I'd like to go as low-lethality as I possibly can. :) Probably I should be asking, then, is: does anyone know any nifty ways of keeping the mites and SHB down that I can maybe make in my very own kitchen? Any beekeeping recipes akin to my anti-bug garden recipe?
Rusty, I only have the one hive for now. I'll keep your advice in mind, though, for the future.

Also, on an only semi-related note, when I was researching oxalic acid, I found this cool website if anyone is interested: http://scientificbeekeeping.com/
 
#19 ·
2) Does anyone have any other suggestions for "chemical free" treatments?
Thanks!
berzee, what are your goals? What will make you happy?

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

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

So the bottom line is, what are your goals?
 
#20 ·
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zd464K3u5aA

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

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#29 ·
Two years ago I was a new beekeeper. Since then I have learned much, developed a bee allergy and been desensitized, and lost all my hives the first winter. This winter I brought through five out of five, three of which would not have made it without mite treatments. The fourth might have survived but got treated anyway, and the fifth I did not treat as it had almost no mites.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just the advice I would give to myself if I were starting fresh with bees...
 
#31 ·
Despite the loud proclamations of some advocates of "natural" beekeeping, using mite treatments does not make you impure, contribute to the ongoing plight of the honeybee, or generally make you a bad person.
Of course it doesn't make you impure or a bad person. The issue is: does it work? Or perhaps more to the point, will it continue to work longterm?

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

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

I think that perhaps the question new beekeepers should ask themselves is: are things getting better or worse for those who follow the regimen you recommend. At least some of the evidence suggests that the trend is not promising.
 
#30 ·
Luterra,

Extremely well written. Agree entirely.

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

Also, as Luterra wrote, count your mites. Do a real count with an alcohol wash or sugar roll (sugar rolls work because of sugar+heat). Don't just "look" at the bees to determine if you have a high mite load. You can't tell, at least not your first year.
 
#33 · (Edited)
I treat ear infections with antibiotics, don't feel devastated.
The very fact that you use 'infections' plural proves my point. Constantly suffering from infections and having to use artificial cures is a treadmill going nowhere.


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

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

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

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

Much easier lifestyle and we know a lot more about childbirth problems.
What you can't predict is how long these infants will live and what quality of life they will have. I bet it will not be as good.
It al depends on what your goal is. If you judge success by how large your population is we have done very well, if you judge it by how strong that population is we are in terrible condition. We are mostly fat blind and on a host of chemicals that we must take daily to maintain even this pathetic condition. The very size of our population puts us in peril as well. Most of us are one week without power away from starvation and death. Our overwintering abilities are now worse than our bees.
 
#35 ·
Read the latest ABJ (April 2013) interview with Dennis Van Engelsdorp (Bee Informed Partnership). He states (direct quote, exactly including all caps), " YOU NEED TO TREAT FOR MITES. It's astonishing to me how many don't! There seems to be a belief that if you just don't treat colonies in your back yard that suddenly resistance will spring up. This is nonsense in my opinion."

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

The best and the brightest in beekeeping all lose hives! Treating for mites successfully without harsh chemicals is also a reality. The REAL issue is whether you're going to treat (with something) or decide to go whole hog beekeeping and produce your own replenishment stock. For large commercial operations it's a simple business decision that is easy to quantify with pencil and paper. For the backyard beekeeper, more personal. Just how much time and resources are you going to/willing to invest in this hobby/way of life/addiction?
 
#40 ·
Read the latest ABJ (April 2013) interview with Dennis Van Engelsdorp (Bee Informed Partnership). He states (direct quote, exactly including all caps), " YOU NEED TO TREAT FOR MITES. It's astonishing to me how many don't! There seems to be a belief that if you just don't treat colonies in your back yard that suddenly resistance will spring up. This is nonsense in my opinion."
Well, sure it's nonsense. But so is the statement "YOU NEED TO TREAT FOR MITES."

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

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

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

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

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

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

If treatment were a reliable way of keeping bees healthy, most sensible folks would do it. But the evidence suggests that it is not.
 
#60 · (Edited)
If treatment were a reliable way of keeping bees healthy, most sensible folks would do it. But the evidence suggests that it is not.
How so? The latest mass survey, Bee Informed Partnership, is showing a trend that losses sustained by those that treat vs. non-treat is significantly different 20% fewer hives lost. Only about 39% of beekeepers surveyed treat at all. The majority are treatment free. Sure, treating doesn't mean you will not have losses, but overall, the lower losses. Lower losses to the tune of 20% fewer than non-treatment. You even quote a 7 - 15% better rate in losses. A 20% relative risk reduction is pretty darn effective. Put it this way, if you had cancer and your chance of it reoccurring was 35% without any further treatment or reduced by 20% with chemo, what would you do? Again, I'm not here to persuade anyone on anything, but the data is the data.
 
#62 ·
.. The latest mass survey, Bee Informed Partnership, is showing a trend that losses sustained by those that treat vs. non-treat is significantly different 20% fewer hives lost. ..
Could you provide a direct link to the document? I was not able to find it. What I DID find is that according USDA, mite counts are steadily increases each year between 2009 and 2011 (for 2012-2013 data is not available). If so, I do not understand how treatment helps if mites are growing? At the same time, all other pathogens are growing also - I do conclusion that bees are getting more sick, right?
http://www.aphis.usda.gov/plant_hea...ees/downloads/2011_National_Survey_Report.pdf
page 10 Fig 6
 
#38 ·
When we stared beekeeping we intended to go non-chemical too. We bought mite resistant bees, and in subsequent years mite resistant queens. We never got a hive that did not reach threshhold for mites. I have stopped using tylosin unless there is a defanit need. We have spent a lot of money buying special queens with little reward. Like Michael Bush states any treatment will alter the flora and fauna of a hive, but of the beekeepers I know, the only ones with healthy bees treat. The development of mite resistant bees is the ultimate goal, but we are not there yet. What I do not understand is why MB techniques have not been more widely accepted and proliferated.
Dave
 
#42 ·
I guess I should have allowed for a third type of new beekeeper: those who are both very invested and their bees and very invested in the idea of being treatment free. That can be a harder row to hoe, but it sounds like rhaldridge is doing all the right things (brood breaks, creating surplus colonies to make up for losses, small cell, foundationless, etc.). I wish him/her well, and suspect that the effort will pay off.

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

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

Beekeeping should be fun. Watching your bees die isn't fun. Overwintering hives is the hardest aspect of beekeeping, and for new beekeepers having their sole hive (or two or three) die the first winter feels like failure. So I say treat for mites, unless you are absolutely committed to not treating and have done some research into treatment-free methods. I don't buy the argument that once you start treating you will always treat. I feel a lot better overwintering five out of five (one of which was untreated) than I did my first winter at zero out of two (both untreated). Once I believe I have developed the skills to keep bees successfully (and I'm getting close to that point), I will feel more comfortable forgoing treatment, as any subsequent losses will then feel like a management outcome rather than failure on my part.
 
#47 ·
It's a bit like gardening. It's not hard to substitute certified organic pesticides (Bt, pyrethrins, Sluggo) for synthetic ones and still get a good crop. It's much more challenging to garden with no chemicals whatsoever.
I like this analogy. I don't blame any organic gardener for using stuff like BT and pyrethrins, and I've done it myself, but the long term goal of an organic gardener should not be avoiding chemical inputs. It should be to create such good soil that the plants grown in it can withstand most pests untreated and still give a good crop. This is something that critics and "debunkers" of organic gardening either fail to get, or disengenuously ignore. They plow up some bad soil, throw seeds in it and fertilize and spray half the test garden, and of course that half does a lot better than the "organic" half. They conclude that organic gardening doesn't work.


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


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

Ray
 
#43 ·
berzee, you can see that one's philosophy to treat or not to treat is a polarizing subject on any bee forum. :)

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

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

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

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

I do not criticize natural beekeepers, realizing their view is as valid as my own. But, I will do everything I can to have queens that head healthy colonies, intervening with whatever treatment is necessary (I don't ever expect to use synthetic miticides however). HTH :)
 
#44 ·
ok so this is a little off topic but I'm new to the game, starting this year and plan on being treatment free. I have not been able to find anything that answers my question :( , maybe you guys can help?! I was wondering, where exactly do bees get mites and hive beetles from? My hive ( I only have 1) is on in an isolated area 35 miles from the nearest town in the sierra nevada mountains. to my knowlege, there are not other beekeepers around. Do bees get them from robbing? are they just naturally occuring? do all or most beekeepers have this problem? I would really like to know how likely my bees are to get them?
 
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