< Will I be willing to take a hit on performance in order to control mites without chemicals? I do not sell queens or bees. I have no agenda. I have tested close to 500 Russian queens. Hard to count the number of NWC and Minnesota hygienic queens tested An inconvenient truth:. In a COMMERCIAL setting when the hive is being moved from one pollination to another and placed on up to five flows in a season there is not a bee on the planet which can survive varroa without chemicals in my opinion! If a member of BEE-L thinks they have such a bee please send and I will test. However I will report me findings to my fellow beekeepers and may even publish me findings. So far no queen breeders have wanted me to test the bees for which they make all these claims other than the Russian breeders. In fact some hives may need a treatment up to four times in a year . Also what David Vanderduesen said concerning Miteaway two. Sadly there is the real world of commercial beekeeping and the world some researchers and beekeepers live in. Now there are bees which will tolerate treatments *as often* but have serious drawbacks. The Russian bee needs to be in yards of only Russian bees. When placed in holding yards with other bees the Russian bee tends to not be able to handle varroa as well (personal testing). Next when the Russian bee out crosses with mongrel bees the varroa tolerance soon drops. If (using USDA-ARS research) you lose 10% of queens each move ( and some hives are moved 10-20 times a year) then how could you keep a Russian commercial migratory operation pure? Next what would be the labor costs of finding and only treating those needing treatment. Also; The long standing advice of the USDA-ARS has been to test a few hives in a commercial yard and if you find some needing varroa treatment then you treat the whole yard. A test was done a few years ago on 38 NWC queens by adding varroa pressure. Only one hive survived. I might add that my Italians would most likely fair about the same. Sooo we treat NWC and in most cases Minnesota Hygienic bees for varroa if we find what we consider a varroa load needing treatment. Now most commercial beekeepers do the above but feel trying to convince hobby beekeepers on bee lists we are doing a sound business parctice is a waste of time. Still I keep posting! bob *********************************************** The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html