I find this interesting! I am coming into my second season. I do t treat. I lost 2 of my 3 hives this year. One had a couple hundred dead bees in it last week, one had 20,000 or 30,000 by estimate, all dead on the bottom. I think both died from starving and not mites. How would I tell? The hive with lots of dead bees had no food, the other hive had some, but not much, like maybe 50 chambers of honey, uncapped.
This is my question... Say you have a Nuc, well most of us know that a Nook generally does not have a high varroa count, Now The Following season that same Nuc will have a substantially larger mite count.. it may or may not make it through the season due to the mite load. Okay let's say it does, I very very, very seriously doubt it will not die from it's mite load its third year. So my question is are your Survivor bees actually nucs or second-year hives, that have just not built up to Mike numbers that kill them yet? Or are your 3-year & Beyond hives surviving without treatment now or ever? Because I have had lots of hives I didn't treat for a year or two and then eyewitness parasitic Mite syndrome and I felt about two inches tall for letting that happen to my bees. Now I don't use harsh chemicals but I definitely treat in many ways. I myself am breeding to hopefully outbreed the mites someday, but of all the treatment free beekeeping I have ever heard of nobody has ever answered this question they just say yeah I lost a bunch and beginning it was rough then the bees turned around, exactly what measures are you doing because you can't just leave bees alone and do nothing and watch him die for three years and then magically they just overcome them? That is how a lot of people portray it, right now I use oxalic acid which qualifies for natural but that is not treatment free.. even vsh Purdue anklebiters Etc.. can be overcome by the mites.... Please teach me something I am missing I am all for treatment free and I respect everything you and this Channel and the rest of them are doing but I am not having the same results
If you are treating with oxalic acid you are not breeding to get rid of mites. You are just treating bees. Let's get something clear. I hear treatment people talk about colonies lasting two or three years without treatment but beyond that they don't survive. What you are talking about is a box. The colony is the queen and most queens today do not survive beyond 2 years. Most package queens and purchased queens don't survive past their first summer and rarely do they make it past a year. Many beekeepers make a practice to requeen every year automatically. When a treatment beekeeper does that it is just called husbandry but if a treatment free beekeeper does it people jump on them and say see! Your bees would not survive without requeening. I'm not recommending the practice just making the point that before we can discuss survival we have to get on the same page as to what we mean by survival. Generally when people think about survival they are talking about bees living in the same box year after year. I've heard people say "this hive has been alive for 5 years". Well not really. I don't think the same colony of bees has occupied that box for 5 years because queens don't live that long and a colony is just the queen. As soon as you have a different queen you have a different colony. So most of the discussion that goes on from both perspectives, treatment free or treatment is just crap. Start breeding for long lived queens and tell me how long they survive with or without treatment.
I'm going to answer this once. If it turns into an argument or debate, it's going to be deleted. I don't do debates. "So my question is are your Survivor bees actually nucs or second-year hives, that have just not built up to Mike numbers that kill them yet?" My record for a hive surviving without treatment, with no unnatural requeening, is over ten years. I have had many hives last more than five years. At the same time, I have had hives that were daughters of these hives last five or more years. However, I dispute that this is a workable method of measuring success. In TF beekeeping, you don't just buy a hive and let it sit. If you do buy anything, it should be one time. You must become part of your local population. Every year, one hive becomes two, the next year two become four, four become eight. One doesn't just have x-number of hives, the population is constantly in flux. So the idea of hive age is pretty absurd. "Or are your 3-year & Beyond hives surviving without treatment now or ever?" Yes, too many to remember. But it in real live, it is irrelevant. Those that can deal with their conditions survive and reproduce, those that can't, don't. If you aren't participating in that process, you have sentenced your hive to death, just have to wait for appeals to run out. And it doesn't matter the hive, treatment or no. Everything dies. There is no good reason for you to feel two inches tall. Their survival is not your responsibility, just like your survival is not theirs. You can't outbreed mites while treating. Full stop. You may out reproduce them, but eventually when treating stops, they must go through the process. "...exactly what measures are you doing because you can't just leave bees alone and do nothing and watch him die for three years and then magically they just overcome them?" You are right, you can't. So we don't do it because as you see it doesn't work, and there is no such thing as magic. What we do is participate in the local gene pool. We catch swarms, we keep those hives to see if they survive, we split and reproduce them, and then repeat. We open our hands instead of holding everything with white knuckles. Hives will die. To us, that is not a bug, it's a feature. We do not participate in this idea that beekeeping is like collecting stamps. They do not sit on a shelf to be admired from time to time. They are not ours to keep and to have. We take part in their world, and the better we do that, the better the experience is. If we hold our hives tight fisted and insist they survive under our artificial conditions, they'll just die. "That is how a lot of people portray it..." That is how treaters portray it because they cannot step back and view the world from another paradigm. Which is why I don't debate. When I don't see the world the way you do, there is no point in arguing. You cannot be convinced using your logic that my way works. And since you (royal you) don't "get" my logic, we are left at an impasse. There is nothing "natural" about sticking an electrically heated element into a hive and vaporizing artificially concentrated oxalic acid into a hive to kill mites. Stop allowing yourself to be lied to. Anklebiters, VSH, Minnesota Hygienic, and all the rest of the so-called resistant bees are not treatment-free. They just have artificially amplified traits that will quickly revert to the mean as nature takes its course. Only treatment-free is treatment-free. Losses do not matter. Learn to catch swarms, keep them treatment-free (and foundationless or small cell) reproduce them, and the bees will teach you what it means to be treatment-free. Because I can't.
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I find this interesting! I am coming into my second season. I do t treat. I lost 2 of my 3 hives this year. One had a couple hundred dead bees in it last week, one had 20,000 or 30,000 by estimate, all dead on the bottom. I think both died from starving and not mites. How would I tell? The hive with lots of dead bees had no food, the other hive had some, but not much, like maybe 50 chambers of honey, uncapped.
This is my question... Say you have a Nuc, well most of us know that a Nook generally does not have a high varroa count, Now The Following season that same Nuc will have a substantially larger mite count.. it may or may not make it through the season due to the mite load. Okay let's say it does, I very very, very seriously doubt it will not die from it's mite load its third year. So my question is are your Survivor bees actually nucs or second-year hives, that have just not built up to Mike numbers that kill them yet? Or are your 3-year & Beyond hives surviving without treatment now or ever? Because I have had lots of hives I didn't treat for a year or two and then eyewitness parasitic Mite syndrome and I felt about two inches tall for letting that happen to my bees. Now I don't use harsh chemicals but I definitely treat in many ways. I myself am breeding to hopefully outbreed the mites someday, but of all the treatment free beekeeping I have ever heard of nobody has ever answered this question they just say yeah I lost a bunch and beginning it was rough then the bees turned around, exactly what measures are you doing because you can't just leave bees alone and do nothing and watch him die for three years and then magically they just overcome them? That is how a lot of people portray it, right now I use oxalic acid which qualifies for natural but that is not treatment free.. even vsh Purdue anklebiters Etc.. can be overcome by the mites.... Please teach me something I am missing I am all for treatment free and I respect everything you and this Channel and the rest of them are doing but I am not having the same results
If you are treating with oxalic acid you are not breeding to get rid of mites. You are just treating bees.
Let's get something clear. I hear treatment people talk about colonies lasting two or three years without treatment but beyond that they don't survive. What you are talking about is a box. The colony is the queen and most queens today do not survive beyond 2 years. Most package queens and purchased queens don't survive past their first summer and rarely do they make it past a year. Many beekeepers make a practice to requeen every year automatically. When a treatment beekeeper does that it is just called husbandry but if a treatment free beekeeper does it people jump on them and say see! Your bees would not survive without requeening. I'm not recommending the practice just making the point that before we can discuss survival we have to get on the same page as to what we mean by survival. Generally when people think about survival they are talking about bees living in the same box year after year. I've heard people say "this hive has been alive for 5 years". Well not really. I don't think the same colony of bees has occupied that box for 5 years because queens don't live that long and a colony is just the queen. As soon as you have a different queen you have a different colony. So most of the discussion that goes on from both perspectives, treatment free or treatment is just crap. Start breeding for long lived queens and tell me how long they survive with or without treatment.
I'm going to answer this once. If it turns into an argument or debate, it's going to be deleted. I don't do debates.
"So my question is are your Survivor bees actually nucs or second-year hives, that have just not built up to Mike numbers that kill them yet?"
My record for a hive surviving without treatment, with no unnatural requeening, is over ten years. I have had many hives last more than five years. At the same time, I have had hives that were daughters of these hives last five or more years. However, I dispute that this is a workable method of measuring success. In TF beekeeping, you don't just buy a hive and let it sit. If you do buy anything, it should be one time. You must become part of your local population. Every year, one hive becomes two, the next year two become four, four become eight. One doesn't just have x-number of hives, the population is constantly in flux. So the idea of hive age is pretty absurd.
"Or are your 3-year & Beyond hives surviving without treatment now or ever?"
Yes, too many to remember. But it in real live, it is irrelevant. Those that can deal with their conditions survive and reproduce, those that can't, don't. If you aren't participating in that process, you have sentenced your hive to death, just have to wait for appeals to run out. And it doesn't matter the hive, treatment or no. Everything dies.
There is no good reason for you to feel two inches tall. Their survival is not your responsibility, just like your survival is not theirs.
You can't outbreed mites while treating. Full stop. You may out reproduce them, but eventually when treating stops, they must go through the process.
"...exactly what measures are you doing because you can't just leave bees alone and do nothing and watch him die for three years and then magically they just overcome them?"
You are right, you can't. So we don't do it because as you see it doesn't work, and there is no such thing as magic. What we do is participate in the local gene pool. We catch swarms, we keep those hives to see if they survive, we split and reproduce them, and then repeat. We open our hands instead of holding everything with white knuckles. Hives will die. To us, that is not a bug, it's a feature. We do not participate in this idea that beekeeping is like collecting stamps. They do not sit on a shelf to be admired from time to time. They are not ours to keep and to have. We take part in their world, and the better we do that, the better the experience is. If we hold our hives tight fisted and insist they survive under our artificial conditions, they'll just die.
"That is how a lot of people portray it..."
That is how treaters portray it because they cannot step back and view the world from another paradigm. Which is why I don't debate. When I don't see the world the way you do, there is no point in arguing. You cannot be convinced using your logic that my way works. And since you (royal you) don't "get" my logic, we are left at an impasse.
There is nothing "natural" about sticking an electrically heated element into a hive and vaporizing artificially concentrated oxalic acid into a hive to kill mites. Stop allowing yourself to be lied to.
Anklebiters, VSH, Minnesota Hygienic, and all the rest of the so-called resistant bees are not treatment-free. They just have artificially amplified traits that will quickly revert to the mean as nature takes its course. Only treatment-free is treatment-free. Losses do not matter. Learn to catch swarms, keep them treatment-free (and foundationless or small cell) reproduce them, and the bees will teach you what it means to be treatment-free. Because I can't.