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Comment by pedrocr | Hacker News Reader

>It would be nice to see more attention paid to the well-being of native pollinators, which already take care of themselves in regards to parasites & diseases.

There's a second avenue which is the treatment-free solution practiced by some beekeepers. The idea there is to keep the selection pressure and just out-evolve the parasites. Given that managed bees reproduce much more often than natural populations there's a chance it might work and some encouraging results:

http://www.bushfarms.com/bees.htm

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Thanks for that link, lots of interesting stuff on there.

For anyone interested, (one of?) the way that this selection pressure manifests is in grooming behavior: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWMSIbeKoFQ The trade-off is less honey production and slower comb building.

Alive bees make more honey than dead ones though.

This is true but misses the point. Beekeeping is done for the sake of pollination: flowering fruit and crop pollination is where the money is at and the focus of the beekeeping industry. The vast majority of managed bee colonies in the US are used for this purpose. Bloom times are region and species specific. California almonds, for example, are usually the earliest bloom. Hives will be moved around based on those patterns. We're not talking 5, 20, or 100 hives, we're talking 10,000 to 250,000 hives at the high end. As blooms end the hives are moved to new orchards through out the growing season. Think bee hives on flat beds crisscrossing the country. At that scale replacing queens gets very expensive (and the hive may reject her anyway) due to veroa mite stress and the loss of the hive is common. Any honey not used by the bees along the way is sold to third parties which in turn sell it to consumers.

I think there's a consensus going for breeding bees for varroa sensitive hygiene/ mite resistance, but treatment free is excessive. You don't need to let the colony die when you're concerned with selecting for genetics. Just eliminate the drones and remove the queen next season.

I mean, you can always withhold treatment until mite counts indicate a problem. Letting mite populations explode can impact other colonies(domesticated & feral) in the area as well.

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