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Are you not concerned that your practices are breeding bees who survive only with medical treatment while empowering the genetics and miticide resistance to rei

Are you not concerned that your practices are breeding bees who survive only with medical treatment while empowering the genetics and miticide resistance to reinforce endemic condition of your region? It would seem some others are breeding bees successfully with zero miticide while you're building a Sardaukar force of mites, bred to tough conditions that even the healthiest of bees cannot survive without help.

kurthr 3y ago
Not really because of the number of generations (12 months is ~50 generations of mites and the miticide is every 2 years) between treatments and the effectiveness of the treatments. It's like breeding cockroach resistance to stomping with a foot (the kill is almost completely total and I remove the miticide before concentration drops). It would need to be really incremental and this is not. I go over 6 months without noticing any (which may mean the hive was actually clean before it was reinfected by an external reservoir). The real breading of deadly mites is leaving your hives thronging with them and bees covered in mites spreading them to every other population of bees/pollinators in your neighborhood. It's like putting SARSCoV2 in an AIDS patient and keeping them alive on a ventilator for months spewing novel viruses with minimal isolation... and that's where we likely got the really virulent strains of COVID. p.s. I take care of 2-3 hives with about 5mi of separation. So I don't really have many local captive hives nearby, but my queens seem to breed pretty true anyway. I'm not a pro, but I've got 10 years of experience in my local area.
- filthy-animal 3y ago
  My girlfriend has this nice little book on managing an orchard, published in the '20s. It has modern orchard management tactics in there, like spraying with lead arsenic to reduce pests, and regular cultivation to destroy all nearby plants so there's no competition. ..of course, this was just before the dustbowl era. You sound like that book.

kurthr 3y ago

Not really because of the number of generations (12 months is ~50 generations of mites and the miticide is every 2 years) between treatments and the effectiveness of the treatments. It's like breeding cockroach resistance to stomping with a foot (the kill is almost completely total and I remove the miticide before concentration drops). It would need to be really incremental and this is not. I go over 6 months without noticing any (which may mean the hive was actually clean before it was reinfected by an external reservoir). The real breading of deadly mites is leaving your hives thronging with them and bees covered in mites spreading them to every other population of bees/pollinators in your neighborhood. It's like putting SARSCoV2 in an AIDS patient and keeping them alive on a ventilator for months spewing novel viruses with minimal isolation... and that's where we likely got the really virulent strains of COVID. p.s. I take care of 2-3 hives with about 5mi of separation. So I don't really have many local captive hives nearby, but my queens seem to breed pretty true anyway. I'm not a pro, but I've got 10 years of experience in my local area.

filthy-animal 3y ago
My girlfriend has this nice little book on managing an orchard, published in the '20s. It has modern orchard management tactics in there, like spraying with lead arsenic to reduce pests, and regular cultivation to destroy all nearby plants so there's no competition. ..of course, this was just before the dustbowl era. You sound like that book.