This may sound crazy and I am sure there are extreems on both sides but I started with 3 mini hives that made it through winter. I apparrently did a pretty poor job of swarm control because all but one swarmed. So I have two hives (and not big ones) that due to actions of me trying to forstall swarms and the bees actually swarming anyway, I have a total of eight hives from those three. I did not porposely make a split except where the bees had queen cups with larva or queen cells in the hive.
The point of the above info is that if bees propagated in that manner and nothing killed them, there would be nothing but bees in this world. I don't want to be miss-understood or considerred hard hearted and I want my bees to live but some bees have to die for some reason for things to stay in ballance. If you moved rabbits or rats to some island that had no preditors, they would do some distruction and over populate and eventually get some disiese or eat themselves out of house and home till there was a population correction.
I want to keep my bees alive, I want to beat the odds, but I just think that some bees are going to die to keep the world in ballance. So I sorta agree for my reasons with Ace's last post that in the end we figure out what we feel best about doing and then have some measure of success or failure. Many times we may also come to wrong conclutions of why something happened. We may find a bunch of bees that had died and did not have stores in the hive and we figure they starved to death and it might be that some other thing caused them not to gether the food or it might be that the food was just not there. It is really hard to know for sure some of the time.
I haven't treated yet, but all my hives might die and I will be stuck looking for why. They are living right now and I also look for the why in that. I do expect to have some hives die no matter what I do cause at the rate of increase with out even trying, I know there would have to be some ebb and flow to keep things in ballance.
Like I said, I might be crazy in the way I think.
Another thing. Ace might tell me that I have bad genetics and swarmy bees and I need to change. I might say well I am going to kill half the hives and steal every thing from them and end up with still as many bees as you have and as much honey.
I only say the above to point out that there are many ways to skin a cat and it is hard to say what is right and what is wrong if the person that is doing the work is happy with what he is doing. I realize there are extreems that are easy to judge as right or wrong but a whole bunch of gray areas that are hard to point a finger at.
I know I am still a dummy and some things are clearer as I go along and if I see them I adjust for the better and so I am sorta happy with how I am keeping bees now untill I change my mind and do it differrent and when I do it differrent I may still be a dummy in the big picture.
I would say if it was too easy a girl would do it but some girls do it better then me so I will just say, If it was to easy to do everyone would do it and the doing it would then have no value. Pick your poisen and then do your best and take the good with the bad.
Cheers
gww