The definition of “treatment free” becomes somewhat evident when you construct the absurd sentence, “My treatment free bees are treated with [name your substance]”.  Be it thymol, powdered sugar, cow urine, grated onions, bananas, hops, active fungal or bacterial cultures, organic acids or coumaphos….these are all “treatments”….a substance [natural or synthetic] that is unnaturally put in the hive by the beekeeper in order to fight or cure disease, parasite, or other malady.” (Yes, I see the loophole….if you open feed it is not “put in the hive”….).

There is certainly some grey area as well.  Whether to include drone trapping as a treatment?  It might depend on the reason you want to stay away from “treatments”….if you want honey that is substantively “natural”, it might not be.  If your concern is to apply “natural pressures” on the gene pool, drone trapping is a problem, and probably considered a “treatment”.

I know a lot of beekeepers who consider themselves “treatment free”, but who feed liberally (even using essential oils in the feed…I’m sure some of them would not put essential oils in the hive as a “treatment” even if they use honeybeehealthy in the feed).  Well, that is fine for them, and there is some value in that over the chemical model (imho), but I would not buy their honey to sell as “treatment free”….not even those that don’t use HBH…for our own purposes (for our business), treatment free includes no feeding (except of honey).

We see a lot of “chemical free” to indicate only using only essential oils, powdered sugar, drone trapping, and sometimes organic acids.  One local producer uses organic acids (has said so in newspaper articles), but puts “produced without miticides” on the label (I’m sure the acid is to bleach the top bars and make them pretty, and it’s just a happy accident that the mites die).

It _is_ confusing when people use the same terms for different things (or to be fair, to have different interpretations of the same term).  I don’t really know what to do about it except to continue to use the definition I’ve been using, as it seems reasonable to me, and I seem to be the one using it most often (I don’t think that there is any inherent right to define a term, but given that we run a treatment free beekeeping conference, make our livings selling treatment free honey, and have written the only beekeeping book I’m aware of that is specifically about treatment free beekeeping, I think if we are using a reasonable definition it’s as legitimate as anything).

On Bee-l recently, I found it very confusing.  When Allen shared with us the loss of his hives last month, he _seemed_ to be saying that he had not treated his bees:

“FWIW, last year (stupid me0 I had spent some time on BS discussing "No Treatment", and drank their Kool Aid, just for fun. 

Now I have 8 lives (and 0 hives) left...”

This was puzzling for two reasons:

1.  I had participated in those discussions with Allen on BS, and it did not really seem like he was “drinking any Kool Aid”..it was similar to the discussions we have here on small cell and treatment free (some of them were quite good discussions, but I certainly didn’t get the impression that he was changing his management practices as a result of them).

2.  In the previous paragraph, he had described a problem hive that, as he put it:

“I should have killed it, I suppose, but being retired and curious, I nursed it, watched, and waited.  I suspect the wave that went through the yard began there.”

…I’m virtually certain no matter what anyone on BS told Allen to do or not to do, nurse a sick hive that an experienced beekeeper [Allen] knew was going to cause a problem and leave it in the middle of his one yard was not among the advice he received.

But then, things got even weirder…and Allen continues to explain in another thread:

“This year I did several things different, though.  I added tymol to the feed in late summer and fall.   I also treated with both Tylosin and OTC several times since I am not producing honey.  I also put on Apivar when I discovered that I had a BIG problem.  It was money wasted, it seems.“

….So I’m left wondering, what does “spent some time discussing “no treatment” and drank their Kool Aid” mean?  It certainly doesn’t mean, “I didn’t treat my bees” by any definition.  I’m not trying to beat up on Allen, but this is a recent case that happened here on Bee-L, and I still don’t understand what was being said, and how “treatment free” (or “no treatment”) was used.

Is it as simple as no mite treatment was used?

In any case, if you don’t treat, your bees might die.  If you do treat, your bees might die.  If you treat your bees when you see a problem, you can be a treatment free beekeeper until your next problem arises.  If you want to keep bees without treatments, you have to (at some point) stop treating.  Only those that actually do this will ever be treatment free beekeepers (as there will always be problems that will make you _want_ to use a treatment to fix things)  I know this is not everyone’s goal (nor do I think, for the sake of the humans on our planet, that it should be…at least not in the short term, not in the status quo).

Now, with regard to the small cell studies.  I’m not sure why they are the way they are…actually I am.  It is easy to measure and evaluate one variable.  Just popping in small cell for a short period of time and counting the mites.

If you look at Jenifer Berry’s study:
http://www.ent.uga.edu/bees/documents/m08138.pdf
…and read the introduction, what you see is talk about some lab work, and mention of some “interest” in small cell among beekeepers:

“These kinds of observations have led to an interest among beekeepers in downsizing comb foundations as a cultural control against Varroa.”

…There is no mention of even claims of anyone having success.  If the researchers had made the anecdotal reports of success as part of the introduction (certainly they were aware of them), then some consideration could have been given to the _other_ variables that might be involved (or solely responsible) with the positive results that was being attributed to small cell.  But these beekeepers don’t control research funding, and they don’t have any say in what research gets done, or how it gets done.  It is the responsibility of the researchers to make sure the experimental model is meaningful.  No beekeeper has claimed success with small cell using management practices that are anything close to how the bees in these studies are run.  The researchers may be testing “small cell”, but they are not testing “claims of small cell”.

It is not true that “small cell beekeepers” haven’t offered critique (and I hope something insightful and constructive at least some of the time)…I know I have, and I know Michael Bush has, and I’m sure others have as well.  At our conference last year, Erik Osterlund (who’s only qualification for the title of “kook” is his belief in and use of small cell comb) gave an entire talk looking at all of the small cell studies, their flaws, and most importantly, where they are misleading.  Some of Michael and Erik’s criticisms can be seen here:
http://thecompleteidiotsguidetobeekeeping.com/index.php/beekeeping/articles/92-small-cell-studies
..Erik’s talk was much more involved than this brief post.

I was looking forward to reading Tom Seeley’s small cell study (that Peter posted about a while back), as he does excellent work!  I asked him about the study when he spoke at our county club not long ago…he said it was behind in publishing…but now I don’t seem to be able to locate any reference to it.  I had a brief discussion with Tom about the study (very brief), but what he told me is that he assumed that if small cell had an impact, he would see it within 5 months (I’m not sure I believe that), and that the standard comb used in the study was wax, and the small cell was HoneySuperCell.  

But, in the end….I don’t know if small cell is helpful, or under what circumstances that might be the case.  For us (and many others), it seemed to help…so I recommend what I am doing and what I feel is working for me.  I’m all for keeping bees on any size comb you want…whatever works for you.  I do wish the research community would do a better job with this one, it would be interesting to know how the metabolic, aerodynamic, and other differences  translate into social (and perhaps social immune system) behavior.

deknow

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