Another message from my most recent beekeeping meeting is that the speaker's recommendation for varroa is to use the "James Bond" or "Live and Let Die" method. Basically, if a hive is struggling with Varroa, he let's it die. He may sugar dust the hive and requeen. However, he does not use any treatment, method or practice to control the mites. He also raises his own queens from the surviving hives, and he does not have all that many losses, after doing this for several years. The obvious idea is that the best, long-term solution to mites is to breed resistance. We are also talking about starting a local queen rearing program to carry this idea forward.
Anybody else doing absolutely nothing to treat for mites? What have your losses been like?
Hi--we have been using this method coupled with carefull selection, to breed from the hives that do well without treatment. The first few years we had severe losses (one year was 90%). However by selecting from the hives that performed well despite varroa, and adding in replacement stock that was potentially tolerrant to varroa (vsh stock), and then selcting from the ones doing well in the following years, we've had good luck. We're going into our 10th season this way.
I go to a lot of bee meetings and meet more and more people who lost all their bees the last time that they DID treat and decided they would rather lose them and not contaminate all their equipment. So they stopped treating and lost less bees that way. It seems to be a growing trend from what I'm hearing.
I also know of a commercial outfit here who lost well over 80% of his stock that put him right out of the bee business, so what exactly are we asking of ourselves?
Why waste all your bee stock to the distructive mite, and use the queen stock from all these "survivours" to keep all of our stock alive.
You know what? I havent heard of any kind of a breeding program that will give you a queen that will provide an operation without treatments for over 4 years.
Lets compaire apples to apples here, simple stock selection isnt the whole story . Perhaps an annually maintained replacement nursery, perhaps some IPM practices used.
I dont think there is a beekeeper in my country, or yours that would put 1 million $ of borrowed money on the line to prove a point,
Break a few eggs to make an omlet, but dont drop the carton...
It is possible to use the Bond test and not risk your whole operation. One can simply run a selection yard to vet the most tolerant and resistant queens. The larger the selection group one can afford the better. Once the best queens are identified, they can be propagated to requeen susceptible and untested colonies in the rest of the operation. If more beekeepers start doing this collaboratively the best bees can be identified and incorporated into commercial stocks faster without unnecessary colony losses.
Been doing it here for more than forty years. Of course, not just for Varroa, but for everything. Just recently I had my very first losses. A very upsetting experience, but I plan to continue letting the bees do what they do best - take care of themselves.
neilv writes:
Anybody else doing absolutely nothing to treat for mites? What have your losses been like?
tecumseh:
absolutely nothing? sounds like the dream of a very lazy individual.
how about raising cattle without proper vaccination for black leg?
how about raising horses without proper shots for sleeping sickness?
how about raising a dog without treating them for heartworm or rabies?
how about raising kids without vaccinating them for polio?
back to subject...
I threat within limit and only when necessary. I test first using the hives that show significant numbers as material for splits. I do treat these prior to splitting to hopefully knock off any excessive mite numbers to give these new starts an even chance. when I do treat I don't use anything that looks like it will assist the mite in being bigger and badder in later gerations than it is now. I do employ some aspects of integrated pest management more so than any chemical. It likely didn't hurt my current endeavor with the bees to start out with b weaver stock and pretty much stick with b weaver stock.... with the exception of adding a bit of minnesota hygenic bloodline along the way in the past couple of years.
I loose and or replace about 15% of my stock yearly. my normal goal is to rear approximately 1/3 of my existing stock for replacement or for expansion purposes.
I guess more accurately neilv you should likely have stated losses from varroa of trachael mites? years back it was not that uncommon for some beekeeper to experience winter death losses (essentially starvation) of from 33 to 50%.
Me, yes, about 50% loss the last two years. Ferals die, small cells die, at first hives two years old. This year I lost several new caught feral swarms, and saw lots of mysterious queen losses. Can't positively attribute any of this to mites. See lots of deformed wing bees.
could reference the link, but I am assuming your linking a reference to the Lusby farm?
If so, I am familiar with thier operation,
but I have to say one thing, do you perhaps figure they have Afficanized genetics expressed in thier bees? I have seen video links of Dee working her hives, and boy those bees look hot!
I went to my beekeepers meeting the other night and they had a speaker who works with Dee Lusby on a regular basis and he had video clips and a whole presentation on natural beekeeping and the live and let die method that they use.
He also stated that her bees do have varroa but they are in small quantities and she does nothing to treat them.
She also takes any frames of foundation affected by disease and puts them out and allows the bees to clean them up.
He said he was shocked at first because everything he has ever been taught is to destroy them and not spread it.
She had no bee loss from ever doing that and claims it helps them develop a resistance to it.
If the bees looked hot it could be the same video that I saw.
He told us that in the video he showed with the bees all over the place that they had opened up a couple of hundred hives that day and they do not smoke her hives ever.
He said that they use the smoker on their own clothing and thats it. He attributes the bee frenzy in the video to the fact that there are literally millions of bees in that yard and they disturbed a huge amount of them and add in the fact that they not using smoke and disturbing them so much makes it look worse than it is.
I am not claiming to know anything about her operation one way or the other, just that I happened to go to this presentation the other night and sharing some info.
I'm also in the Live and Let Die mode. Raise queens each year from the best producing survivors, strongest to overwinter in my climate. Variably cold warm cold etc.. I see lot's of varroa on the slides so they're dealing with these mites daily. This will be 4th or 5th winter and my losses are usually in the 20-25% range with 30 + or - colonies, although it's my nuc's that get hit the hardest with the smaller clusters. Because I have access to new queens each year I don't think I can say that any of these surviving colonies are really 3,4,5 years old since I can move colonies to cell builder, nuc's, combine, or production hives fairly easy and do. So, an interesting process..
>>He said he was shocked at first because everything he has ever been taught is to destroy them and not spread it.
She had no bee loss from ever doing that and claims it helps them develop a resistance to it.
>>bee frenzy in the video to the fact that there are literally millions of bees in that yard and they disturbed a huge amount of them and add in the fact that they not using smoke and disturbing them so much makes it look worse than it is.
All I can say is that when I was watching the video, I felt those bees looked hot, and did not envey the guys working them at all. I enjoy working bees, and that video I did not enjoy watching, although I did enjoy seeing the huge hives and their precieved great production.
I have video taped my work in my operation before, during a honey pull, millions of bees leaving the boxes, and they sure did not come across as being hot as they did in this video. I would think anyone watching this video would say the same.
I agree with Ian's comments on the video. I think we've seen this video before here on BeeSource? And I seem to recall that deknow posted them before? And we've had the debate about Africanized/not Africanized. That's why I was wondering if deknow was the speaker at the meeting that Natalie attended.
I have to say that I don't know who deknow is. I am new here and have to find my way around. Although I guess its possible it was him, but I don't know.
Anyway, the hives could be hot I really don't know I was just sharing the info I had and just took him for his word. Maybe they don't seem hot to him?
As I said, don't know anything about that operation but I really enjoyed the presentation.
Not treating for disease, and letting them clean the frames, meaning what?
and by doing so, how do you figure they become resitant to disease? And what exactly what disease are you talking about?
Bees won't become resistant to anything unless they are constantly compromised by the pest or pathogen. If you want AFB resistant bees, the bees have to be exposed to AFB. When the exposure stops, the resistance will disappear...over time. Same with Varroa tolerance, and resistance to the viruses vectored by the mites.
As I said in my post I was simply repeating what was in the presentation in the presenters words, not mind.
As in, SHE lets the bees clean up the frames, the ones affected by disease and SHE feels it helps develop their immunity.
I don't FIGURE anything.
If you read my post what I have said is pretty clear. You are asking questions that I have already answered. The answer is not going to change as I do not have anymore information than I have already given.
Its says she lets the bees clean them up, you know how bees clean things up I don't know what else to say about it.
I think you are under the impression for some reasons I don't understand that I am making these statements when in fact if you read my post I am, as I said, sharing some information that I recieved at a presentation where her methods were mentioned and I thought it would be helpful to share, or maybe the information would be useful. It was obviously a mistake and I wonder now why I said anything at all.
I hope this clears things up. I was relaying information that I recieved at a presentation, what I have already stated is the extent of my knowledge as I said in my post. I know nothing more of her operation.
If you have anymore questions I can't help you, maybe you should contact her and ask her what you want to know.
Thank You Natalie
I don't treat for nothing.I do Starter Strips all natural comb.I don't like being a Para-Medic for Bugs.I loos my hives to ants mostly.I never count mites waste of time.The Strong Survive the weak succumb.Read Backwards Beekeeping by Charles Martin Simmon I follow his Lead.
kirk-o
I have never seen ants kill a hive. A weak divide, or maybe a nuc with a queen cage with sugar. If you are finding hives you think were killed by ants, I suspect that it died from some other reason and the ants are just there scavenging.
>The Strong Survive the weak succumb.
I bet you will change your tune on this quote with a few more years experience.
I have been watching and reading this thread. "Live and let die" has been in my head all day long. I went to the trusty Ipod to listen to it. Didn't have it. I do now. Beatles not GNR....
Thank you for the book recommendation kirk-o. I am always looking for more information on natural beekeeping. It seems odd to me that anyone would be against it.
We have been raising, picking queen cells from our super strong hives in the spring for the last 10 years or better.
We will even run hives in triples & croud them to force a swarm/queen cell issue.
I will be very honest as we have a lot of bees that at times are some what mean to work with.
But on the same hand we worked bees this year into September in t-shirts with no problems.
I no longer look at a hive that is real easy to handle for a queen raiser.
I have found that the agressive trait more times than not will result in a hive that is more apt to remove varroa & or bite a leg or two off and they can no longer hold on to the bee.
The 1st thing we look at in the spring is as to how clean the bottom board is.
I will then pull a comb & introduce a ant or two to see the the reaction that the house bees show.
If the invader is tolerated I keep looking.
If the invader is not tolerated I will then introduce varroa from some drone brood.
More times than not the bees will tear off a leg or two in just seconds.
There will be some hives that the bees will fight among themselves to tear the legs off the bee.
There will also be hives that I swear the house bee can smell the varroa as they will run 4 or 5 inches across the frame over the top of other bees to grab the varroa.
I keep telling myself that this is what needs to be done to cure our varroa problem.
Bees are a very smart insect.
Look how long they have been on this earth.
They have learned to survive by taking care of thenself.
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