WHERE are the real treatment free beekeepers?

[gww]

Kamon Reynolds

Ah, the million dollar question. Unfortunately for me I could not wish my mite problems away no matter which TF guru I bought queens from.......or how much research and raising from the survivors I did.......or only using local swarms. I don't understand why beekeepers still think bees will become immune when every other critter has pest and disease too. To think bee pests will stop with varroa is also wishful thinking it is just a matter of time till something else hits.

I agree with this pretty much. I have not treated. I keep chickens also. I mostly just provide shelter and clean water and food. I try and make sure the door is shut at dark and open it in the morning. Some chickens get sick and die but over all, enough live at all times to make it worth it. My wife will make me intercede more then would be my instinct but she was not too interested for the first few years that we had chickens and the disease results were pretty close to now when we do work on sick chickens more then we used to.

I don't inoculate the babies or keep them separated from wild birds like some of the big operations do. Yes, some birds still get sick sometimes and I bet some bees will also. It is what I expect.

The question with bees or chickens, to me, comes down to, are you happy with the results of your management style and what it is getting for you compared to what you are having to put into it.

Treatment free success is a subjective term that might be based on what the goals are and many things effect outcome with the keepers mileage being veritable based on lots of local factors with many not being understood.

No doubt that bees get sick no matter how you keep them. The question is what is success compared to input of the person doing it. Adjustments have to be made till the keeper hits what he wants to get out of what he puts in.

This discussion will be on going and success will always be hard to define.
Cheers
gww

[AHudd]

I was kidding about what MP said that Dee Lusby said to him. I agree with you in that only one side can be "right". There is no way to install one piece of foundation in one frame with the shelf on the bottom of the cells on both sides.

The entire concept of how it could possibly make a difference how the Y is oriented has left me befuddled and bewildered. Someone, earlier, pointed out how the bottom of the cells become rounded after a few rounds of brood.

Maybe I missed something or one needs to be elevated to Guru status to be able to really "see".

Let's put some downriggers on this troll; Someone (not me) call Lauri and tell her she has been doing it wrong all these years. She puts foundation in sideways.

Alex

[JWPalmer]

JWPalmer my friend! That hurt.

You are not too far from me. PM me your address and I would be happy to visit your apiary this spring. Show me a successful apiary using these methods and I will tell the world. I am all for innovation and bringing new perspectives to beekeeping, but you are not. You are rehashing old ideas that did not pan out as well as the original proponents of them had hoped. When these "sure fire fixes" are brought up again and again, I can't help but be reminded of the definintion of insanity. All the best to you.

If you truly are interested in TF beekeeping and don't mind the drive, the Ashland Beekeepers Assoc. Dec 6th meeting will be presented by one of our members who is a long time successful TF beekeeper. He will be sharing his methods and answering questions. You are welcome to attend.

[odfrank]

The impossibility of maintaining Housel positioning in an functioning bee business was the first clue to me that Dee Lusby was a farce. Then I followed her ramblings on her yahoo group and finally saw the first videos of her apiaries by Deknow. These definitely proved that it must have been her late husband who was the beekeeper. Later came the video posted today filmed by Solomon, more proof that all of them know nothing. As I already had 35 years experience when these people misguided me, luckily I quickly recognized that they were just fakes selling conferences to innocent beginner beginners and had little truth to offer to the beekeeping community. My biggest disappointment with Michael Bush was his years long support of Dee Lusby. You only have to watch those videos to know it is not a viable bee business.

[Tennessee's Bees LLC]

[msl]

Odfrank while I agree with most of what your saying..
The hives in the video are ALIVE, despite being almost unmanged
So some thing is going on.. the yards certainly are not keeping there numbers up with constant splitting and swarm catching like some other gurus...

I cant find it, but some were Michael Bush had posted his history.... (paraphrasing from memory) losses on top of losses till he switched to local ferals and small cell, then success.

Superstitious Behavior is common in both humans and animals. It happens when we confuse cause and effect. It seems to have a large effect in beekeeping, its likely many of these gurus honestly and truly believe. I should add it's not the mark of a weak mind, its just how our minds work. I feel they are wrong on small cell and what not, based on well organized research that has been done, but I don't believe they are fakes, they are just misguided as to the cause and effect.

Skinner’s paper “Superstition in the Pigeon” (Skinner, 1948) demonstrated how non-contingent reinforcement caused ‘superstitious’ behavior in pigeons. Food pellets were given to the pigeon on a fixed interval schedule regardless of the bird’s behaviors, but they became conditioned to engage in ‘superstitious’ rituals that they just happened to do when the food first appeared. The response was varied in all the birds, ranging from pendulum motions, head thrusts, and turning around counter-clockwise, but the frequency of these behaviors, which were previously not present in strong numbers during adaptation to the cage, increased to 5 to 6 instances in a 15 second interval. This study was replicated by Wagner and Morris with children using tangible reinforcement (Wagner & Morris, 1987).

https://bsci21.org/a-behavioral-look-at-superstition/

[crofter]

Yes, Skinner did some interesting work.

I think I may have been pre-innoculated against superstition at quite a young age: Koolaid did not interest me so I was not much inconvenienced by the would be gurus.

A lot of their drivel is akin to the observation that It is the waving of the tree limbs that causes the wind to blow!

[little_john]

I've just been reading an article by Kirk Webster ( http://kirkwebster.com/index.php/a-p...rcial-apiaries )
who I instinctively consider to be an all-round good guy - meaning that I believe 100% in his honesty and integrity - and so I had great difficulty in squaring the persuasive content of the above TF article with my own negative opinion regarding the underlying rationale of a treatment-free approach to beekeeping.

Indeed, his article is so convincing that it took me a full half-hour to spot the fundamental flaw in his approach - which is - that he actually 'treats', but doesn't recognise that what he's doing constitutes 'treatment'.

Perhaps my claim is easier to comprehend if one considers what would happen if Kirk was to 'put his feet up' for a few years, and stop intervening in all aspects of the life of the honeybees within his colonies. I would bet my pension that his colonies would revert to how they were before he adopted his TF approach. Hence - his management techniques have actually constituted a form of ongoing 'treatment'.

This then becomes yet another example of the old chestnut I keep banging on about: "what is the precise definition of 'treatment-free' ?" (which is simply a rhetorical question here, as I fully accept that asking this question 'for real' is against the rules for this sub-forum)

Until we begin to accept that all forms of beekeeper intervention (including management practices) constitute 'treatment' and should therefore be included within the word's definition, we will continue to argue over this false dichotomy between the treatment and treatment-free approaches.
LJ

[JWChesnut]

Treatment-Free Beekeepers-29.jpg

The attached screen shot is part of a long thread discussing MB's losses in 2018. I haven't seen MB discuss this subject on BeeSource. The details appear ambiguous (ie. were the losses in the winter ? How are "pesticide" losses assigned in the winter, when PMS declines are more typical, etc).

[Riverderwent]

it's hard to tell who's trolling who here.

[Riverderwent]

all of those "good ideas" didn't save the ferals form being wiped out.

I disagree that feral bees were wiped out, at least in the area where I live, based on my observation of feral hives and based on the research and conclusions of others. scientificbeekeeping.com/whats-happening-to-the-bees-part-5-is-there-a-difference-between-domesticated-and-feral-bees; http://www.researchgate.net/publicat...United_States; www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4361586/. I don't doubt that there are many areas where feral bees were wiped out.

[squarepeg]

at one time i took exception to jwc's use of the term 'acolyte'.

i am moderating on that to some degree insofar as it relates to someone with little or no actual hands on experience emphatically espousing management practices based solely on something they have heard or read.

[Adam Foster Collins]

Part of Dee Lusby's ...At around minute 5.00 with a little imagination I can almost hear a voice yelling "HOUSEL HOUSEL".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEp9YqUE7kA

I love this. Solomon Parker standing there, gloves full of stingers, talking to the camera, but you can't hear him over the angry bees and Dee's desperate cries in the background. Looks like footage from a war zone.

After several years treatment free, culminating in turning 75 hives into 14 in one winter, I decided that if one wants to make meaningful progress with treatment free bees, you first have to have enough bees (and the skill) to really do some breeding. The idea that one can 'breed' mite tolerance using open-mated queens in a non-isolated area with a few hives - is just not feasible.

I feel it's up to the people who have enough bees to dominate a given area's gene pool, and have the drive to monitor mites and make mite tolerance a part of their selection process for breeders. If a colony shows that they're not able to handle varroa, you can treat them and requeen. I tried the bond method for a while, but I no longer see the point in sacrificing all of those bees, when the only thing that really matters is the queen you choose breed from.

I like the approach Randy Oliver is currently advocating, and will do something along those lines myself once I have the numbers I want.

Adam

[msl]

River I may have chosen my wording porly.. I did not mean extinction, but a massive die off on a huge scale, and in some case followed by rebuilding of numbers.

[Oldtimer]

How are "pesticide" losses assigned in the winter, when PMS declines are more typical, etc).

That's easy. A person could not lose 90% of their hives to pms that winter, because the person was small cell. Just on that basis the losses were clearly not pms, and therefore must have been caused by pesticide.

[msl]

Yep..
been there myself
"mites? why would I have mite problems? I have mystical ferals in magic top bar hives on natural comb!".... ahh the early years, and one of the reasons for my sig

This spring at a local meeting, I ran in to a TF keeper who lost 100 hives in early march to "a pesticide kill"
Not too sure what was being sprayed, or what crop was blooming for the bees to bring back while there was snow on the ground and we were still a month before dandelion bloom
Mites? they don't have mites, the USDA inspected their hives and were unable to find a single one.... something about mint plants in the area

flip side is they seem to run a lot of hives, more then me, so "something" is working for them.....

[GregV]

Let me offer this quote from one of the better known "pro-treatment" bloggers.
https://honeybeesuite.com/let-mites-...not-an-option/

Rusty states:

I have resistant stock in my top-bar hive that hasn’t been treated at all and is still incredibly strong after seven years.

[GregV]

I've just been reading an article by Kirk Webster.... Indeed, his article is so convincing that it took me a full half-hour to spot the fundamental flaw in his approach - which is - that he actually 'treats', but doesn't recognise that what he's doing constitutes 'treatment'.......LJ

It is time to just call it "pesticide-free" management practices.
People should just start using this honest, simple definition and move alone.

[JWPalmer]

Even pesticide free is a sticky wicket. Are OA and FA pesticides since they both occur naturally? What about vegetable oil used in hive beetle traps?

[GregV]

Even pesticide free is a sticky wicket. Are OA and FA pesticides since they both occur naturally? What about vegetable oil used in hive beetle traps?

Well, arsenic is also occurring naturally. Quiet a potent pesticide.

Excessive OA presence is, clearly, toxic (hence some parts of rhubarb are not recommended for eating, as one example).
As for me, I do not want excessive presence of OA in my perga - I harvest perga.
Perga is human food in my house.

And so on...