a Garret Wilkinson snip followed by > my comment.... 

There appears to be several factors involved that allows those bees to thrive in their wild state.

>these are in the simplest sense characteristics and not cause... 

I don't agree with allowing colonies to crash because mite loads get out of control but I also disagree with multiple prophylactic treatments.

>excellent point... and there are any number of ways for the beekeeper to interact with varroa.  Some of these that are most benign (ie at the bottom of the IPM pyramid) are doable at the hobby scale but likely undoable at the commercial scale of beekeeping. You have mentioned at least one of these more benign treatment later in your post.   

I'm starting to wonder if there is much more to bee health than having just VSH and hygienic bees, not that it isn't important. 

>I sometimes wonder if beekeepers FIRST need to work on their own attitude and worry about the bees less.  The honeybee did quite well for millions of years before there were beekeepers and I suspect they will do well when we no longer are here.  My larger point here is sometimes the best thing to do is nothing at all and at least then we do not make the situation worse < a good example of this is a number of the original products use to combat varroa (some still used off label by some beekeepers) that have shown themselves to contaminate the hive and consequently reduce queen and drone fertility.

Gene in Central Texas..... 

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