> The majority of the world's beekeepers are aware that hives are polluted by
> external and internal chemicals. If they don't know this then they don't
> know enough about beekeeping and should raise chickens instead. The
> handwriting is on the wall: the old ways of keeping bees don't cut it. Even
> if the new ways are not perfect yet, nobody will win if beekeepers don't try
> to change.
>

Deja vu all over again.

First, beekeepers do try and change. I run tests of just about everything I
have seen on this list that purports to allow bees to thrive without
treatment. The only time I have lost my bees is when I tried "natural"
beekeeping (small cell and essential oils).

I bred for treacheal resistance and it worked. Not so for Varroa. The years
I treated my colonies (oxalic, Apistan, and Apiguard), my bees survived. As
noted, the years I tried to go with minimum (natural) treatments is when
they died.

Second, the world's beekeepers may know that chemicals get into their hives,
but sure does not stop them from adding more to keep their bees alive. I do
not condemn them for that since it is fairly costly to buy new colonies
compared to treating.

Third- the norm for beekeeping before Tracheal and especially Varroa was
hands off to a major extent. Set and forget was the norm for a backyard
beekeeper. Try that now as a commercial beekeeper and you will naturally be
broke. I can afford to lose bees ( but not all which happened only twice in
20+ years and both because I wanted to keep to minimum treatments). Any
commercial business cannot. We have, because of porous boarders, allowed a
soup of pathogens into our apiaries, and until we have a more uniform bee
able to withstand that onslaught, we will be treating. Last I looked, we
still do not have a uniform human and are still treating them with chemical
cocktails.

Bill Truesdell
Bath, Maine

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