Charles wrote:


> Personally bees with self induced brood breaks (swarms, supercedure or just
> stopping brood) are not TF.....?


The definition of treatment free seems to vary depending on who you ask.   I describe what I am doing as keeping bees off treatments (nothing foreign introduced into the hives except a little vegetable oil in the beetle traps) and the very limited use of (if any) artificial feeds.

That the bees by their nature choose to swarm every year is interesting but not anything I am trying to induce.  Creating an artificial swarm by splitting out the overwintered queen is an intervention not so much to help with mite control as it is to keep me from having to capture and hive the swarms.

The few colonies that have responded to favorably to my prevention methods and didn’t swarm haven’t had any more problems overwintering than the rest, but they also always ended up superseding their queen anyway.

Since these were derived from feral stock collected from the nearby woods, I typically allow some swarms to fly off each year to put a few back.

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