BEEKEEPING LEARNING CENTER > NATURAL & ORGANIC BEEKEEPING METHODS
How to Start, With the End Goal of Being Treatment Free
iddee:
Although there are no guarantees, it will likely help with tried strains rather than just run-of-the-mill. Weaver's American, VSH, and here's one here in NC.
www.waynesbees.com
Michael Bush:
>I would like to be treatment free, but it seems that people who are treatment free took a while to get to the point where their bees were successful, and I'm not sure how they got there.
As Acebird said, lack of experience is one of the reasons new beekeepers lose bees. It's not just Varroa mites. If you look at the statistics that the Bee Informed Partnership collects, there is not much difference in losses between people who treat and people who don't. Some years the treaters lose more and some years they lose less. If you keep bees you will lose colonies sometimes. There are several aspects to having bees that can survive. Some of that has more to do with climate than Varroa. Southern bees don't do well in the north, in general. That's not to say that SOME of the bees you get from the south won't survive the north, but in my experience the majority will not. You are sort of in between. You're not in the far north but you probably get more winter than Georgia where a lot of the bees you would likely buy would be from.
>I read so many things that say you need to be proactive with varroa, or your bees will die.
I have done nothing for Varroa since 2003...
> If my goal is to be treatment free, should I start out that way, just monitoring to see how many mites there are, and then do something if it gets out of hand? Should I do nothing if it gets out of hand,
That is one option, but keep in mind that sometimes things get worse before they get better. Sometimes right when the Varroa get bad is when the bees get motivated to do something about them. Here is a quote from Kirk Webster on his observation:
"...when 150 queens were introduced into nucs with brood untreated for 18 months. This brood had a normal outward appearance when the nucs were made up, but four weeks later about half of them were starting to decline with PMS-type symptoms. But after another three weeks, almost all of these colonies appeared normal and healthy again."?Kirk Webster
That is not to say that all your bees will always recover, but if you monitor you are likely to just decide to treat when it may or may not be helpful.
>and just let the bees die and try again with different bees?
That is another aspect. Multiplying your colonies from the survivor colonies is one aspect of treatment free beekeeping and if you start with treated southern bees you many have to go through some to find bees that can survive in your climate and bees that can survive without treatments.
> It seems most people are told to rein in the idealism and just get a year or two under their belt
By then you have wasted two years where you could have been moving towards natural cell size and treatment free bees.
> but how should I go about getting a year or two under my belt? Basically my question is, with the goal of being treatment free, what should my treatment plan be going into my first year?
http://www.bushfarms.com/beesnotreatments.htm
http://www.bushfarms.com/beesfoursimplesteps.htm
http://www.bushfarms.com/beesnaturalcell.htm
The15thMember:
Thank you all so much! You made me feel so much better. I'm the sort of person who likes to go into something knowing exactly what to do and when, and beekeeping seems to require a different approach to learning. I was fearing being underprepared, but it seems like that's just part of the game. I'm sure it will be an immensely educational experience, both from a scientific standpoint and from a personal learning standpoint, and I'm feeling now like I can jump right in and take my best shot at it. Thank you all! :happy:
SiWolKe:
The 15th member:
are you still here to update?
I have started with treated bees and they died. The treatments were professionally done by my former mentor. So I see no sense in treating.
This year I treated one colony because I did not want a mite bomb exploding in my beeyard in season. Not to save them.
After 4 years of tf I observed that treated bees act differently than tf bees, comparing mine to friends who treat their hives. Theirs have what I call "livestock behaviour", mine are more acting like "ferals".
If it comes to some traits. I do not mean honey harvest or aggressive behaviour against the beekeeper.
The15thMember:
--- Quote from: SiWolKe on December 27, 2018, 02:51:22 am ---The 15th member:
are you still here to update?
I have started with treated bees and they died. The treatments were professionally done by my former mentor. So I see no sense in treating.
This year I treated one colony because I did not want a mite bomb exploding in my beeyard in season. Not to save them.
After 4 years of tf I observed that treated bees act differently than tf bees, comparing mine to friends who treat their hives. Theirs have what I call "livestock behaviour", mine are more acting like "ferals".
If it comes to some traits. I do not mean honey harvest or aggressive behaviour against the beekeeper.
--- End quote ---
Hi there. Yep, I'm still around. I was unable to get completely treatment free bees like I was planning actually. The apiary that I was planning on purchasing from had higher than expected winter losses and didn't have enough bees to fulfill the preorders, so they were all cancelled. I was able to purchase 2 packages from an apiary that only treated with oxalic acid though, so that seemed good enough to jump on for me.
I treated both my hive with powdered sugar starting in about June (I think), but like a classic rookie I didn't monitor my mite counts well enough, and one of my hives crashed and absconded in Oct. from heavy mite load. If you'd like more information on that, take a look at my thread "Unsure What's Going On In This Hive", apparently it was a textbook case for a mite crash. After my one hive died, I treated my other hive with formic acid (sold as Mite Away Quick Strips here in the US, I don't know if you guys have those in Germany), to avoid a mite bomb, like you mentioned. The remaining hive seemed to take the treatment well and seems to be doing well at this point into the winter.
This upcoming year I'm going to certainly monitor my mites better than last year. I'll probably try sugar dusting again, and if I do, I'll certainly be more proactive about it than I was this past year.
As far as temperament goes, my bees seemed really calm last year. I don't really have anything to go off of, since it was my first year beekeeping, but just by the way other people talk, my bees are really nice. I was only stung like 4 or 5 times last year.
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