jeff
When doolittle shook a hive and removed the brood from it and put honey in the brood nest, These could all be considered treatments or they could be considered Bee keeping and if done right "good" bee keeping.  You are correct on not having a standard term on any of it wether people keep bees to make royal jelly, collect venom, polinate food, make wax or make honey.  There is no standards there either cause most poeple keep bees for what they can get from the bees not because they care so much about the bee that they want to worsip them as a god and build temples to them.  So in the end, it sorta comes down are you profitable or not.  Is it a treatment if you were going to make a split anyway for increase of as an insurance like michael palmer did it with his nucs so he could cover his apple polination contracts with out haveing to buy packages to do it?

If you are not making splits because of mites but would have been making them anyway and then just do it in the best way to reconize one way helps more with mites than a differrent way you could have done it, is it treatment?  Is it treatment against a wierd wether pattern that you feed a little sugar water to keep a hive from starving or is it bee keeping?  Souldn't the real guage be if you are making a profit and what your profit to labor hours is. 

 Would that not be the fairest way to count?

There are many ways to kill a hive, it could be poisen from the apple tree grower to having too many bees on a crop that does not support them well enough with out help or many other ways of bad impact.  Finding ways to get the job done with bees and make a profit is the real measure.
Cheers
gww

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