Pete > I speculated 15 years ago that small to medium colonies might be less suscetible to varroa induced collapse than the very large colonies we tend to prefer up north. I mentioned the concept to Prof. --- and he scoffed at it. Very large colonies will always be more healthy than small ones, he said.


Support for your observation can be found in the review study below where just about all naturally occurring varroa survival is in areas where, for various reasons, the colonies went unmanaged for a period.  Without hive management, the colonies populations tended to fluctuate and in some cases remained small as is the case when swarming is allowed to occur naturally - Gotland and Arnot are examples.  The locations are well known and we have been discussing them for years in terms of varroa fecundity via haplotypes, bottleneck selection pressure, and more recently Seeley's Darwinian approach.  I agree that colony size is somewhat overlooked in favor of other factors.  


Brazil and South Africa
Island of Fernando de Noronha
Primorsky, Russia
Gotland, Sweden
Avignon, France
Arnot Forest, Ithaca, NY, USA


>Natural Varroa mite-surviving Apis mellifera honeybee populations
>Barbara Locke  2015 - open source


Bill Hesbach
Cheshire CT 

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