Gotta love bee-lAs one who has read bee-l for years in digest form,I am amazed( and disapointed sometimes), how quickly a thread degenerates to a tangent off the original post.I' m not complaining,because that is how discussions go.But I would like to toss out another "Seeley" thought from the ABJ article and hear other's thoughts.
This is a snip from Tom' s reflections on the BeeAudatious conference in Dec, which he admits inspired the ABJ article.
http://beeaudacious.com/index.php/2017/02/14/report-back-tom-seeley/#rel_904
  "The essence of Darwinian Beekeeping is letting the bees live as naturally as possible, so they can make full use of the toolkit of adaptations that they have acquired over the last 30 million years. I want to stress that it is not a recipe for let-alone beekeeping. Indeed, it requires diligent beekeeping, especially in monitoring colonies for high levels of Varroa and preemptively killing colonies that develop skyrocketing mite populations. Doing so selects against colonies without resistance to Varroa, it creates selection against highly virulent mites, and it prevents resistant colonies from getting fatally flooded with Varroa from the neighbors."
How many would consider killing a colony instead of trying to save it with miticides?
Also note that,in the original article,Tom freely admits that this "recipe" is geared more towards the small scale beekeeper instead of the big guys so maybe we could leave out the"it won't work in my business model" comments and focus more on the theory.
PS   Randy,is that your smiling face I see in the group picture?


Jack



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