a Randy Oliver snip followed by my comments... 
>
> >My observation of some no-treat beekeepers is that they do just what you
> describe. By continual splitting and selling off the splits as nucs you can
> control Varroa and sell the nucs as non-treated colonies.


My first question to those who tell me that they have been successfully
keeping bees without varroa treatments is to what degree they have been
expanding their operation.  Morris Ostrofsky has been making this point for
years--frequent splitting can keep you ahead of varroa.

my comments...
As you suggest in a previous comment it is easier in this era to make money from selling nucs than in selling honey.  It is also much less risky.  As a business strategy it can also produce an income stream when there is none (ie it can act as a bump to firm liquidity at a time when there is money going out and none coming in).  

I do a lot of splitting here but at least initially this was done to resolve the math of loss defined by varroa and it disease vectors... which is to say this splitting was to replace ahead of the curve hives that I knew (via experience) that would be lost over the season.  I have now about as many hives as I need  (been there for perhaps 6years) to provide a short list of purposes (local honey sales, producing some small quantity of nucs and lastly providing whatever bee stock the TAMU lab might request). So my growth rate now is at about zero when you look at numbers year to year (ie not season to season).  

I do split in the early spring of the year and in the early fall.  Although at times my hives can grow fairly large (tall) but being a lazy beekeeper I would rather keep them at some reasonable size < which can encourage a bit of splitting.

My two hundred hives are the product of 3 packages I obtained from BWeaver some 15 years ago.  Along the road from 3 to 200 I obtained a good bit of queen stock from the same firm and in reality Danny's efforts are largely why I move to the no treatment agenda since I have small yards of bees that crowd up against some of BWeaver's queen rearing yards.

just another uninformed non treatment beekeeper.... 

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