Treatment vs Treatment free is one of the biggest arguments about beekeeping. Do you treat your bees, exposing them to chemicals, or let natural selection take its course? There are people who swear that they haven’t treated in years, and they had less than a 20% loss. There are people who swear that if they don’t treat, then that colony is dead. This is not a page writen to convince you that treatment or treatment free is the way to go, but this is going to clear up some misconceptions about this divisive issue.
There are two types of “Treatment Free” beekeepers.
For the sake of clarity, we will refer to these groups as “Pure TF Beekeepers”, being completely treatment free; and “IPM Beekeepers”, who rely solely on IPM methods for managing their varroa loads. Where ‘Treatment Free’ is being used in the general sense, we’ll use double quotes - just so we’re all on the same page with the language.
Most people don’t realize that most of the time, “Treatment Free” actually means IPM Beekeeping. IPM beekeepers, on the other hand, use integrated pest management techniques like drone brood culling or brood breaks. It should be mentioned that the Pure TF beekeepers are regarded by and large as irresponsible beekeepers, as the vast majority of the time when someone says they haven’t treated, they are making no efforts to maintain any kind of varroa control, educate themselves on varroa, and regular beekeepers who do treat regard this as antithetical to “animal husbandry”. With that said, there are some beekeepers who are Pure TF Beekeepers who rely on cultivating or maintaining Varroa Sensitive Hygiene (VSH) genetics in their colonies - We would argue that these beekeepers actually fall under the category of IPM Beekeepers, as VSH genetics is part of an IPM strategy.
Some beekeepers who use treatments like formic acid and oxalic acid, consider themselves treatment free. This is because these treatments are made from “natural ingredients”. Oxalic acid is a naturally occuring acid found abundantly in leafy green vegetables, and formic acid is naturally found in bees.
Another thing to consider is VSH (Varroa Sensitive Hygiene) survivor queens.
The queens lay workers that use hygienic behaviors to manage varroa. They use techniques ranging from biting the mites’ legs to uncapping brood with a lot of mites to throw them out. Sometimes they are too aggressive and dedicate too much energy to killing mites, and they don’t produce much surplus honey. VSH stock can be manually selected, or found in wild feral colonies - but there is much debate over the genetics of VSH stock, including whether or not the genes are recessive.
If you are relying on VSH stock, you should be monitoring for VSH traits using harbo assays or buying stock from revered and experienced VSH breeders.
The reasons why both IPM and Pure TF beekeeping work is often to location, the bees, and luck. Many Pure TF beekeepers have a low varroa pressure locally, and can succesfully keep hives without treatments long term. There are other areas where varroa pressure in the locality is so high that a colony not receiving treamtents will collapse within a handful of months. There is no rhyme or reason to why this is the case, but colony density, disease strains and other local beekeeping practices might play a part.
Luck is also a factor. Some beekeepers have hives that have survived for years without any intervention, yet there are hives (owned by the same beekeeper) just a few yards away that without treatment there is no way that they will survive. What your neighbor does with their bees might not work with you and vice versa. And genetics is pretty much a dice roll every time the colony requeens - a colony that was showing high VSH tendancies might just have all of those genetics disappear in the next generation.
“Treatment free” has been argued as long as honeybees have had mites. It might not ever be settled. Our take on this as a community is that frankly we don’t care what you call yourself. Our only hope is that you dedicate time to understanding varroa; understand that in not managing varroa in some way, you are contributing to the death of your colony. Our only goal is to help you on this journey of understanding, and not to dictate how you should keep your bees.
With that said, we do have recommended paths for new beekeepers, but these are to assist you on your learning journey and to make sure you can approach subjects like treatment free from a position of success and experience, and not go into it blindly hoping for the best.
TODO: Add pitcures or something to make this less like a scroll of text