Greetings

I do not doubt that many people have had success keeping bees without using modern management techniques. The question of local adaptation frequent comes up. It is important, however, to realize that isolation and local adaptation are not the same thing. If I live in a cabin 50 miles from everybody and I don't get the flu, it's not because I am locally adapted but because I stay away from sick people. The same thing is probably true with bees. 

I keep bees in an area where there is a lot commercial beekeeping and so I expect to have to deal with the same problems  they do, often in the same way. This year I am using drone comb trapping as a way to control varroa, but I never used it before because I thought it was too much trouble. 

My habits were formed back in the 80s when I kept 500 hives by myself, and I didn't micromanage them. Supering up was the main management technique. I never requeened, although I raised thousands of queens to sell. I always figured a hive that superseded on its own, had a better queen than anything I could raise. 

Like a lot of folks, I preferred to use new queens to make nucs and not fuss over failing colonies. The main reason for systematically raising queens (aside from to sell them) is to obtain stock improvement. In the past few years, however, I have begun to question whether the conventional breeding of queens is generally a fool's errand. 

Nature follows no such plan in breeding of bees, adaptive traits are formed by the interbreedin of large populations without admixture from other regions. That is, evolutionary change takes place over long time periods with large gene pools. Local changes are temporary and short lived at best. That is, unless they are largely imaginary, which I suspect.

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