> One thing that comes to mind is honey bees surviving without treatment.
Many people claim to have them, but often produce no evidence, or else
anecdotes and just so stories.

May I offer some hard evidence?  I monitored mite levels in a starting
population of slightly over 1000 colonies this past year, in order to see
what proportion would actually survive without treatment.  The queens of
all the colonies were daughters of roughly 15 queens whose colonies had
previously appeared to exhibit resistance to mite buildup.

At each monitoring event, I eliminated from consideration any hives in
which the mite counts were on a trajectory towards eventual colony death
from varroa (I treated them, so that not a single colony died from mites
during the trial).

As we approach the 1-year mark, of those 1000+ hives, it appears that
perhaps 16 have maintained mite counts below 4 mites per 100 bees--that's
less than 2% "survival"  (over 50 actually survived, but their counts as of
this week required immediate treatment;I'm estimating the 16 since I've
only sampled half so far).

Had I not treated the rest over the course of the year, I'm guessing that
their inevitable collapses would have overwhelmed even those 2% with mites.

This is not to say that others may be starting with bee stock that exhibits
a higher degree of mite resistance (VSH, Russian, or confirmed feral), but
would certainly apply to anyone starting with commercial stocks (which
exhibit far less resistance than the bloodlines that I started with).

I'm as enthusiastic as anyone about breeding bees that exhibit mite
resistance, but the take home message is that one should indeed be
extremely skeptical about claims regarding the long-term survival of any
bee stock without hard supportive data.


-- 
Randy Oliver
Grass Valley, CA
www.ScientificBeekeeping.com

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