REPOSTed 12/9 to make reading and printing easier..
 
At 07:47 PM 12/7/97 -0500, \\Dr. Pedro P. Rodriguez wrote:
>There are things that change in this world of ours, especially in the medical
>and veterinary fields.  Any one who at this day and age believes that be mites
>can be lived with without treatment definitely belongs in one of the following
>classifications:
 
Well my good doctor I must disagree with you and I hope I do it in a way not
to make fun of any other poster.
 
First I must say this again and again NO beekeeper should be treating for
any kind of mites or any other pest or disease that does not have them.
 
Second, any treatments for the trachea or any of the acarine mites has
little or no economic value as this pest comes and goes in most
commercial apiaries wit hout economic harm in the majority of apiaries
studied.
 
Third, any chemical treatments no matter what or how harmless the material
is or said to be should not be used without some known threshold of
initial treatment level information based on study and this is
deficient in most all mite treatment recommendations I have seen
including those approved by government regula tors.
 
One of the major problems I have seen in the US is that beekeepers treat
their bees with whatever is the popular or government regulated
treatment of the day and their bees still die in the winter and these
losses are today said to be mite related when they may or may not have
any thing whatsoever to do with mites and only a continuation of what
has been the norm of the past. The other side of that coin history
shows that beekeepers are very, very slow to abandon treatments and
only by the removal of a product from production will they stop using
it. I won't list these products but will say that no one can fault the
beekeepers who continue to use them as long as they could as most all of
these products were better and always's less expensive then the
products that replaced them and in many cases the replacement are no
less safe to use and are not as effective.
 
>1.  He/she knows nothing about bee mites, especially Varroa.
>2.  He/she is not a beekeeper, if he/she is, he/she better quit beekeeping to
>avoid bankruptcy.
>3.  He/she likes disappointments.
>4.  He/she should start reading more recent literature on bee mites.
 
>As stated before, it is okay to express one's personal opinions in
>democratic countries,
 
Will I ain't no Democrat myself and many of the readers here may not be the
least bit interested in politics anyway and are as far as I know most
are only expressing their own opinion's based on their own experience
or what they have read or heard from reliable sources. I don't believe
that using any unnecessary tr eatment is justified because of someone's
faith in any brand of politick's or the outcome as advertised by that
treatments promoter, which may in itself lead to your number two above
just as fast as a more conservative non treatment approach to
beekeeping which is as natural as the history of bees not surviving the
winter to spite all the care given by their keepers.
 
>however, to poke fun at a subject which is so significant to the future of
>beekeeping in particular and humanity in general, is insincere.
 
I sure did not read any "poking fun" in any post on Wintergreen and only
read what has been reported in both private and public research papers
on the TRACHEA mites that live off of honey bees in the US and Europe.
 
There are two very interesting Revelations about all these bee problems and
the first is for the last 90 years of so the symptoms for the major
unexplained traumatic losses of bees have been the same but every few
years the cause and treatment changes due to what is called BS. I won't
outline the unchanging symptoms now because they should be well known
to all by this time as most so called BS papers in the last 20 years
have quoted them line for line.
 
The second realization is that with the TRACHEA or acarine mite that there
is a spontaneous rise and decline in its population in all long term
hive studies, and that this has also been reported by several creditable
observations with the Varroa mite without any beekeeper intervention or
treatment. It is too early to say if this is going to be the norm for
Varroa and all of this is compounded because so few are not treating
with something or the other and it is near impossible to find untreated
bees to study.
 
>In my humble opinion, we need to assume a more responsible attitude
>regarding bee mites.
 
If this means that we all should follow then you are in for a big
disappointment as beekeepers are not followers and by their own nature
are going to seek different paths around any problem. I don't know why
this is but it is the way it is in both the science of beekeeping and
the husbandry of bees and what makes our bee science and bee business
different from all others in agriculture. If all inputs into bees were
the same each season the outcomes would still be differ ent from year to
year. This makes honey bees very poor subjects for science other then
reported observations and has frustrated scientists with beekeepers whom
some have said are poor in following directions because their scientific
observations could not be repeated by the beekeepers.
 
IMHO, ttul, the OLd Drone
 
(c)Opinions are not always based on facts.
 All are welcome to use my own.