To treat or not to treat

[Eyeman]

Do not delude yourself. Strong treated colonys does not mean no losses.

A bad case of Nosema due to a wet winter, isolation starvation, late queen failure (or very late swarm) are things that the beekeeper cannot help easily.

Things that can help are mouse protection, methods of stopping hives blown over and starvation can be helped.
Bigger animals can remove mouseguards (I have had one polyhive accessed tby eating through from the base). Hives on bases\stands can be undermined, and sometimes bees just simply will not eat fondant.
I have had losses due to starvation despite a heavy boxes of honey (ivy honey).

We all hope to have as few a loses as possible, and hopefully yours will be fine.

 

[Eyeman]

I've been bringing two colony's from the brink because of varroa not a nice sight varroa destruction the person that had them hadn't treated for two seasons what a bloody mess they were in thankfully there OK now itso opened my eyes for sure . We need to keep on top of our IPM .
I treat all of my livestock cows sheep pigs chickens whatever . Bees are also stock as they produce honey.
So why should they be any different.

The difficulty most folks have in adopting an IPM approach to varroa and only treating-when-necessary is getting a reliable estimate of how many mites are in the hive

 

[Eyeman]

Occasionally I have hives that keep dropping huge mite numbers over weeks. The treatments I give are properly applied - other hives are OK - so theoretically with even only 80% kill rates - it is mathematically impossible to get hundreds of mites dropping weekly over 6 weeks.

Unless they are robbing heavily infected and dying colonies elsewhere.. (And I know of several nearby).

People who don't treat are deluding themselves unless they practise AI or are so isolated their bees can only breed amongst the apiary. As drones can fly 10s of miles to mate (via lots of rests on the way) the quoted "12 miles distant from nearest colony" is unlikely to be far enough (If true).

Hands up anyone who wants to keep bees with 25% or more colonies dying each winter. (If they kept animals like that they would be in jail)

An alcohol wash gave 50 mites on 300 bees in one of my colonies that's a 17% infestation- I estimated there were 5000 mites in the colony so an 80% kill would drop 4000 mites! That's an average of 666 per week over 6 weeks (the little devils) Who's counting?
What's important is doing a post treatment mite count to see if the treatment was effective.