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From: "yoonytoons"   "I will be damned if I put any chemical in the hive,
again."

Absolutely admirable - a style of beekeeping devoutly to be wished. Yoon
however seems to be opting out of the responsibilities of a beekeeper by
just leaving the bees to sort it out themselves - or die in the attempt.
This seems not only to fly in the face of experience but also to be unfair
to the bees.  After all it was not bees that enabled varooa to jump from
cerana to mellifera - beekeepers caused the problem and it is beekeepers who
have, at the least, to allow melifera time to learn to cope with this
addition to the pests that trouble them.

So, no chemicals, yes.  But to support mellifera during whatever time scale
is needed for changes to natural behaviour to evolve/intensify, surely we
should be providing permanent mesh floors (to take advantage of a natural
weakness of varooa in that soem 20% they lose footing when moving from bee
to bee, and with mesh floors they drop out to their doom).  Next, if we are
depending on intensification of the grooming habit to dislodge a higher
proportion, should we not be trying to 'train' the bees to groom by dusting
with powders such as icing sugar?  I use 'train' loosely of course, as is a
metaphor of course, acquired behaviour is not transmitted to future
generations - but a colony on the way to evolving grooming will have its
chance of survival increased if the beekeeper encourages the bees to use
that behaviour to the full , so that colony will stay in the race and so
will be a candidate for evolving further to full self-sufficient grooming
behaviour.

Dusting of course works only on the mites riding adult bees , not those
buried in brood cells.  So for maximum efficency, we need to time the
dusting to when bees have no brood - which can be mid-summer if simple
management techiques are used to divide a colony to broodless queenright
swarm and queenless parent colony - the swarm is then treated immediately
and the parent 3 weeks later when all brood has emerged.

With dusting we can hope to both save colonies from collapse whilst still
detecting the best groomers to  breed from . When tougher treatment is
needed, we can add spraying the broodless beees with lactic acid or
hopefully sucrose esters - soft non-residue forming chemicals. In addition,
we can take out the first brood laid after the break and treat with formic
acid or simply fook out sealed brood - the surviving vaooa will be
concentrated in those cells.

Yoon's abandoning his bees to fate is like giving up teaching children to
swim and just throwing them into the deep end to sort out those with a
natural instinct to swim.  With respect, we need to continue patiently to
give help as needed to lengthen the timescale within which nature works.
IMHO, at the stage we are now at, witholding all help will just leads to
deaths that are in vain - and which may actually delay detection and
breeding from colonies that are acheiving some progress.

Unhappily, the day darkens for Yoon's bees since even if the varooa are now
removed, the virus levels are likely to so high the colonies will fail to
regenearte after clustering for winter.  I write in hope these thoughts may
save their sucessors from a similar fate.

Robin Dartington

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