some opinionated thoughts on greg's hive and tim's response: a colony that survives 5-7 years without any treatments may have some degree of tolerance/resistance worth trying to confirm/preserve...what you could be seeing at present is a queen supercedure, resulting in some break in the brood cycle, or perhaps a late summer swarm requeening with the same effect which has been suggested as a natural defense mechanism against disease/parasites, much as artificial requeening by beekeepers. 1)check your varroa levels before you attempt any treatment....anything less than 10% infestation may be tolerable depending on environmental conditions and presence/ absence of brood/adult stress symptoms; 2)making a split to prevent swarming at the appropriate time would indeed be a way of trying to preserve this strain's characteristics, although with no guarantees but again breaking the brood cycle may preempt need for treatments; 3)mixed results with menthol is symptomatic of other "soft" treatments, such as essential oils and organic acids...often they can have a repellent effect on the bees with brood abandonment and queen balling as possible risks; 4)crawling bees may be the result of viral infections (acute or chronic paralysis) activated/vectored by both mites and nosema or other agents, as would deformed wings...however, there is not necessarily a correlation between stock survival and susceptibility to these pathologies. _____________________________________________________________________ You don't need to buy Internet access to use free Internet e-mail. Get completely free e-mail from Juno at http://www.juno.com Or call Juno at (800) 654-JUNO [654-5866]