"Or is there some other reason you think hobby hive data is biased?"

The best survey data on hive deaths I know of was run by the Marin County, CA, bee club on its members.  This club is hobby bee keepers and a small number of small sideliners from what I understand.  They showed 60% winter losses overall.  I wish I could provide a link to their results but did not save the link and can not find it right now.

Locally, losses last winter ranged from the teens to 100%.  The teen number is myself and one other larger hobby bee keeper who both control varroa.  If you throw the two of us out of the data losses averaged 72% for those I personally know about.  Some of those who do not control varroa have been in the hobby 40 years.  One only four years.  Amount of experience does not seem to matter.

As others have mentioned last winter was tough.  In NE Ohio we had the coldest Feb on record.  Many nights below neg 20 deg.  Darned little snow compared to normal.  The deepest it ever got in my yard was about 16 inches.  Not a single 24 hour snow fall over a foot that I remember.  We normally get a few 18 inch snow falls.  So, my hives had little snow protection to insulate them.  I did my usual winter hive prep.  I made sure the slot on the inner cover was down.  That was all I did.  No wrap.  No top insulation.  No sugar on top.   I had a couple of hives with open screened bottoms all winter that did fine.  A couple of the people who do not control varroa wrapped and insulated tops and still suffered high losses.

As near as I can tell hobby bee keepers talk a bit about Varroa but in general do nothing about them.  My son who lives in MI says the people in his local bee keeping club are the same as the people locally.  They do not even seem to value queens that should offer some benefit like VHS queens or Minnesota Hygienics.  They would rather spend their time griping about round up and neo nics killing their bees.

I personally think any survey on hive losses that does not account for varroa control is made of numbers about as useless as the first 1000 phone numbers in your telephone book.  There may well also be other important factors.  Such as making sure the bees had adequate food going into winter.  Perhaps even factors like sucrose vs HFCS are important.  I doubt if comb age is important.  Locally people lost lots of hives on first or second year wax and on 30 year old wax about equally.  I also wonder if time of varroa control measures may be important.  My impression, as I have expressed before, is it takes quite some time after varroa control before I see things like deformed wing virus drop to insignificant.  So, early season varroa control may be more important than we recognize as colonies can often out reproduce the varroa in spring and early summer and seem to be doing well even with high infestations towards the end of that period.  How about the
 importance of ventilation?  I have seen warped and top insulated hives with all kinds of green mold towards the top come spring.  That can not be good.

The fact is hive deaths are too high and it results in bad publicity for bee keeping.  Many hobby bee keepers are so hands off they have no idea what is going on in their boxes.  Many seem to be in the hobby to try to help "save the bees."  Overall I am not at all sure these people are positive contributors to dealing with problems.  Dealing with problems involves hands on management.  That is the opposite of the natural bee keeping wave among hobby people.  If there is a hands off solution it lays in queens that will resist varroa in my opinion.  That does not seem to be happening very fast and may not ever happen.

Dick

" Any discovery made by the human mind can be explained in its essentials to the curious learner."  Professor Benjamin Schumacher talking about teaching quantum mechanics to non scientists.   "For every complex problem there is a solution which is simple, neat and wrong."  H. L. Mencken

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