>>So during the course of the season, the hive thrived and died 3 times., never was there any lack of bees flying around, and without a serious inspection, the average person would have never know. Seems to me there is a lot more of this going on than we may understand. Death, robbing and other bees moving in, can happen in short order.
Which points up my main difficulty with the TF crowd. They often state that they do not treat and yet have "success". What they do not define is what *they* mean by success. No metrics. And, as with the info cited on Lusby, Kefuss and Gottland, when these "successes" fail, or are discredited, you never hear about that. Nor do you hear about the often onerous management that goes on...frequent splitting, lots of queen rearing, tracking uncap/recap activity, tolerating high winter losses etc.
That word success means very different things to different people.
As Charles points out, even if wild, untreated bees manage to survive, and do not finally lose their tenuous ability to survive as did the bees in cold winter areas or on Santa Cruz Is., are they at all productive? Do they yield surplus bees or honey? Are they able to service pollination contracts? Survive in densities sufficient to pollinate nearby crops? How did they manage to co-survive with mites, and for how long? And is this achievable in every locale? Or just some?
And why do they talk as though breeding up a Varroa-proof bee is our only option?
Surely gene silencing and similar tools hold more promise, you just can't aspire to do that in your back yard (hence no path to that personal glory that was mentioned earlier by BusyBees), and you need to wait for science and the market to bring those tools to beekeepers.
Meanwhile we can keep bees productive and healthy via treatments: we need more and better work done on that approach.
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