Dr. Marla Spivak was one of the featured speakers at WAS 2015, which I attended. Among other things, she emphasized the need to treat varroa as a community problem, and try to get everyone on board to control them. 

She compared the situation to vaccination. Vaccination works best if everyone does it. That way a disease does not have a big susceptible population. Unvaccinated individuals being few and far between, are less likely to catch and spread disease, whereas if few people get vaccinated, then epidemics are likely. 

The treatment free crowd, as we know, creates a reservoir for varroa to thrive and re-infest healthy colonies. The live and let die approach is not working, and varroa are a bigger problem than ever. In her actual words: "The mites have gained the upper hand."

PLB

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