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Subject:
From:
"E.t. Ash" <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Informed Discussion of Beekeeping Issues and Bee Biology <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Fri, 15 Jan 2016 06:49:39 -0500
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a Mr Villa snip..

Anecdotal experience with random untreated splits given highly  
selected resistant bees vs. splits given unselected commercial queens  
shows that the first can end up with hardly any mites detectable,  
while the latter get to destructive mite levels by the end of the  
summer.  As some have pointed out, this is not a realistic situation  
in that not everybody has access to pure highly resistant bees and  
cannot afford to reconstitute them if queens are superseded, but the  
observation is still real.

So regardless of how mites are distributed and influxes that do not  
represent what a colony developed or did not develop, the factories  
that produce these mites are the primary source of the problem.

my comments..
although not designed as an experiment we have seen similar things here when the students (Texas A&M Bee Lab) look to use groups of my own bees as replication for their individual experiments < with one replication being bees that set at the Bee Lab site which are of known origin (mostly Hawaii) and at least to me display little natural resistance to varroa.   Even in comparisons like this which is a bit like apples to oranges (which is to say the Bee Lab hives are generally never more than one year old and my own apiary sites have hives which may well be 2 to 3 years old) the data is quite remarkable.

At this point in considering the threads (and similar prior threads) title there seems to be a lot of conflicting information and at least a good deal of detail plucking, logic and reasoning to fit the mood of the respondent.  So I guess you can go along with the 'mite bomb' hypothesis if you wish... or not.  None the less your last paragraph (above) pretty much sums up the crux of the problem.  It would appear 'treatment' does resolve this problem in the evolutionary 'approximate' sense but in the 'ultimate' sense is likely unsustainable.

Personally with non treatment bees I have never really observe this (mite bomb) happening here... however my own yards are quite remote, are of reasonable size (normally about a dozen hives) and except for another non treatment queen rearing operation there is no where for those little buggers to go.  

 

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