> Killing off the *dinks* is the best management tool going. ...Everybody on 
> the list seems to think breeding from the best is the solution

Not everyone.  As you know, I think culling hard, especially in breeding 
stock, is the secret to breeding better bees, not narrow selection -- and 
have said so, often.

One of the problems with keeping dinks around is that they can produce 
drones that drag down the outfit by breeding with supercedure and raised 
queens, plus, they may be diseased in some way that is contagious.  Not only 
that, they distract from the profitable hives.  Generally, I always just 
shook them out, pulled them from the yards and took them along to a nurse 
yard, or stacked them all up to see if the result amounted to anything 
splittable.

Moreover, I think that those who actually do some serious queen rearing and 
thinking soon arrive at the same conclusion, although I often think of the 
young beekeeper who took all the courses, built nice queen rearing 
equipment, then raised all his queens, plus some for his neighbours, from 
one queen mother!  He is no longer a beekeeper, BTW.

> I have wanted to say the above for over a decade but felt giving away our 
> utmost secret might cause hard feelings from my peers!

It's an open secret.  You can tell people that forever, and many, maybe 
most, will not listen because they want to save every hive.  They see those 
marginal hives as potential profit, not the distraction and drag that they 
so often are.  Hope is not a strategy.

Businessmen on the other hand, know that 20% of the hives cause 80% of the 
work and expense *if you let them*, and they are NOT the same 20% that 
generate 80% of the profit.

> To me each hive is a unit which costs me X amount of dollars a year to 
> keep around. My sucrose feed costs per gallon are around 3.50 a gallon 
> now. Meds, labor and trucking etc. all add in . The price of a queen is 
> not the highest expense when considering the cost of maintaining a hive.

Nobody can afford to truck dinks around the country and spend time and money 
on them in hopes that they will miraculously recover. On the other hand, 
some can let the hives sit and hope, especially if they do not have the cost 
structure and scheduling typical of a commercial migratory beekeeper.

You mentioned earlier that some are now treating up to four times a year 
with Miteaway.  That cannot be cheap or easy.  I try to imagine hauling the 
rims and pads around and all the manipulations necessary to do so, plus the 
high cost of labour and the product and have to wonder if, given the 
*uncertainty* of income (even a contract did not guarantee getting cost 
back), along with the *certainty* of sunk (locked-in and spent) costs, if a 
risk-adjusted analysis might not prove that disease resistant stocks --  
assuming they exist -- to be more consistently profitable, with lower 
locked-in costs, even if the income level may be a bit lower, too.

I looked at your list of favoured suppliers and did not see them on Glenns' 
list of those breeding resistant queens, and have to wonder if the list is 
incomplete or if the bees in question are so much more productive that the 
burden of constant treatment pays off.

Seems to me that Charlie mentioned some commercial beekeepers are doing 
pollinating successfully with Russian stock.  I find that fascinating.  I am 
hoping that we will get a progress report.  Assuming that they do a good 
job, the next question is how they take the trucking and if they still 
manage to handle the mites without treatments.

> commercial beeks have culled more hives over the last 20 years than both 
> mites.

That may help in the short run, but if they keep buying stock that needs 
culling, and don't raise their own queens, no progress is being made.  Of 
course many do raise their own queens.

Here is the bottom line:

The one most important lesson I have learned in agriculture is that those 
who survive in the long run are not those with the highest production and 
the largest inputs, but always are those with the consistently lowest cost 
base and most conservative approach to input expense and risk. 

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