To care or not care about is kind of a loaded option.  I can care about my five dollar chicken but may not care so much that I take it to a $40 vet that may or may not be successful.  I can care about my life long friend of my dog at end of life but may still have to decide on a cancer treatment for thousands for a few extra months life.  I can care about the odds of some treatment for me or my parents and weighing the percentage of gain compared to percentage of pain of some possible procedure.  Not all will make the same decision in these types of situations but questioning the ethics of the decision made is an ethical decision of its own.

There would still be good science attached to the above situations but the science would still leave room for there not being and exact answer to the question ask.

Afb seems to be somewhat different in my mind than mites.  With abf, you can have it or not have it and the spores do not go away.

With mites, you do have it.  

The treatments are different also.  If you burn afb, it is gone.  If you treat mites it is not gone but just knocked back for a bit.  You can not get rid of mites by burning cause you would have to get rid of all bees also cause all bees have mites.

If a person professes a love of bees, it could be that he names his queens and loves individual bees or it could be that he loves bees as a species.

As a species, science has shown that some unmanaged  bees life spans in some places seen to be a long after mites as they were prior to mites.

Now the science might have changed what people can get out of managed bees after mite.  However, I can get more out of a chicken if I put a light in the chicken house during winter but it is still an ethical question on whether to give them a break or take as much as you can.  I have did both.

I personally look at my apiary as a whole more than as individual hives and manage with over all apiary goals in mind.

Lots of things kill bees.  Every single bee keeper can do more than he does to maximize the return of what an individual hive can make for him.  The ideal in my mind is that since all could make some kind of improvement but are keeping bees for some ideal of production, it does not seem unethical that enough profit is enough and it does not have to be the most you can get.

It does seem that science is still finding things out that are not know for sure.  One item that interest me and that I have seen indicated by antidotal evidence as well as studies is be learned behavior and also how bees learn to use stuff from their environment to help themselves.  This would seem to rely on having a problem that they needed to learn about as the impetus for the needing to learn anything.  Something like this would not seem to be a genetic passed on type of thing where you could locate a gene.

Since man is using bees for himself, it seems ethical from a apiary wide bases to decide what success looks like and try and meet those goals.  We do not care about the bees enough that we are not going to send 600 to almonds knowing that we might lose two hundred but can make that up with splits after almonds.

I find it very hard to decide when it is a good thing or a bad thing to be mean to individual hives.  We all seem to pick our poison.    My poison is that if I do not count time, I have made a small couple hundred profit on a hobby I have enjoyed from day one and that a poor man can do forever because it cost nothing but a little time.  Seems ethical to me.  Even untreated the bees treat me better than my chickens do.
Cheers
gww

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