Hello Humdinger & All, Holiday weekends are typically slow times on BEE-L so I will try and answer your comments as may be the only response you get. I will be gone for a week next week looking out for my interests in California so need to get enough BEE-L to last a week let alone my wife's home cooking! > Treating bees, I understand, is necessary for those commercial >beekeepers since they need a solution here and right > now. This >practice appears to be myopic, however. The beekeeping industry has been on *life support* for quite a few years now. Ironic that four bee farms went bankrupt in Missouri last year when if they could have survived one more year they could have enjoyed the high honey prices and got a needed lift. To sum things up other than chemicals there has been no PROVEN alternative! > However, if we truly love the bees for a longer term, we should stop >treating them, thus quickening the eventuality so that they will learn to >survive without human intervention. I bought into the above thinking back in the eighties and early nineties. *Grandpa beekeeper * said let the weak die off and breed from the survivors. After all my leave alones had died (and i do mean all) I was glad the leave alone hives were only a small percent. Several close friends lost close to two thousand hives before going to chemicals when they refused to treat for tracheal mites or varroa at all. > bringing in whichever bee species that had learned to live with such > pathogens--a reason I had, in the first place, asked to hear from for > those who have not treated the bees for a while. I have always left a percent untreated for many years. I have got a survivor hive going into this winter two and a half years untreated. I did have to add frames of sealed honey for the bees to survive the first winter. I took the colony out of a building in which they were said to have been for five years. They swarmed this year and I cought the swarm with old queen. They raised a new queen and I believe she mated with my SMR drone colony (but she only knows). > AHB seems promising, especially since by the time they spread into >most of the southern states, their super-aggressiveness will have thinned out. Keeping AHB hybreds might be something a hobby beekeeper might consider but loading/unloading around 500 hives of those on a summer night is not something I might find enjoyable. Stir up one hive and the whole yard reacts. Next week we will be working in yards with around a thousand hives to a yard. I loaded a couple very aggressive hives on the load as we were running short on hives to send. They are marked for spring requeening . Smoke does not mellow those gals and seems to only make the situation worse. Lift the lid and they fly right at your face. Work the hive next to theirs and they react. Maybe they are of AHb decent? We have already tinkered with SMR and Russian queens, to name just a few, to broaden the gene pool. True. How SMR queens came about: When trying to breed from hives with low mite counts (a poor method but all the average breeder has to work with) the USDA at Baton Rouge found that certain colonies were handling varroa because of suppressed mite reproduction. They switched their selection process to only breed from those colonies with SMR. We have got quite a few SMR queens of both the red and yellow line. They range greatly in honey production and temperment. All SMR hives have the lowest varroa counts of our hives. I test each hive. My partner tests random as he has a greater number of hives. The SMR queens are only going into their second winter untreated. Mite counts remain below threshold . In fact lower than any hives tested. Why not AHB from Brazil? There are still plenty of nasty tempered AHb in Brazil. I do not see the AHB as the answer to any of our beekeeping problems. The gene for bad temper seems dominate in the AHB I have been told by those doing research on AHb. Plus bees with *capensis like traits* have been observed in the feral bees of Arizona by Dr. Eric Erickson, Dr. Hoffman and others. I certainly do not want any *pseudo queen* activity in my yards. Beekeepers requeening on a regular basis with queens from a reliable breeder would have little problem with AHB (myself). Hobby beekeepers letting their bees requeen on their own in an area of africanized drones could be in for a big surprise when they stroll out to work their backyard hives. "What happened to my gentle bees!" they might ask. Bob