>As a professional beekeeper with decades keeping bees I say the methods you describe are not easy to implement and success is hard to achieve.

And otherwise beekeeping is easy for the new beekeeper?  My point is that beekeeping and beekeeping practices are complicated.  Unless one is merely "beekeeping by recipe" (in which the final dish doesn't usually look like the photo in the book anyways), there is a lot to misunderstand and a lot to get wrong.

The methods I generally advocate are perhaps not easy...perhaps even moreso for the new beekeeper with a colony or two.  I don't think I present them as "easy" either (I used to give a talk on treatment-free beekeeping called "a hard row to hoe" that highlights many of the difficulties).

Speaking for myself (and we did use apistan and menthol our first year beekeeping), both Ramona and I were really turned off by what we were  told was necessary to keep our bees alive.  I don't think we would be keeping bees if 11 years later we were convinced that treatments are necessary to keep bees alive.

But is it bad to want to do something hard?  Everything worth doing is hard.

>What you describe in your post can hardly in my opinion be called "treatment free" or with the SHB traps chemical free.

Sorry, I don't think I was clear.  I was pointing out some of the mistakes that new beekeepers make whether they are treating or not.  Such mistakes and misunderstandings are part of being a new beekeeper, and I'm not convinced that those brand new beekeepers who are too busy to become properly obsessed deciding to use treatments do any better than those that decide not to use treatments.

deknow

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