Steve Nobel:
  Me, I hope you have found the silver
> bullet, but you 
> haven't proven it yet.         

Reply:
Well, it's now 25 years since starting/doing going back to more natural sized foundations/combs in the middle of the spectrum range,and no chemical treatments. In fact it's also getting off of drugs,no usage of essential oils or Acids;  no usage of artificial feeds, and no storage of extracted equipment to bother about. 

It's learning how to acclimitize bees back to local regions again for sustainability, with slight variation in breeding for modified out-breeding parameters. It's having clean hive products, including the beeswax ( if you know about the latest contamination beeswax problems with foundations Maryam Frazier talked about recently and now on internest in video movie). 

I'd like to see another person keep going over 25 years and at same time help others follow (over 2,000 now on the organic list and growing for clean beekeeping). 

As for the show me stuff. First it was we'll see if you can do it. Then show the proof with 300, then 500 and then........well, CCD symptoms last year with 200 hit in one spot bringing numbers down from about 860 to about 600. But held even with added overwintering normal hives to make up, and didn't artificially feed, though I fed my fall crop to carry them overwinter into spring while working with survivors, and now in process of working yards up for more hives and production this year; and I don't have to worry about the contamination in hives others do, and I am making splits with whole boxes of bees, brood, and honey now.

Any way, you show me another person with over 25 years doing this in USA and other running clean and on a sustainable system (not that I havn't been a beekeeper for close to 48 years now).

As for the small cell and regressing, remember I've always said with the small cell it's a whole bee management system and that means 1/3 diet, 1/3 breeding, and 1/3 environment, for you will never win doing soundbits and pieces........Nature works with a whole system in unison......maybe someday scientists will learn that....for this is one case were it's all or nothing sorry to say...and on that I will stand!!!

Dee A. Lusby
p.s. 61 year old woman, and proud of it. So if I can do it then you guys cannot say men cannot!!


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