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Comment by radiorental | Hacker News Reader

This is simply not true.

As other have noted, splitting is a natural process of beekeeping.

however, I've noticed a discernible change in the beekeeping profession in the last 10 years.

To take a step back - there is a huge variation in bee characteristics from hive to hive.

What I've noticed is that package and nuc suppliers (aka bee breeders) are far less likely to treat hives. And it has become near impossible to buy 'traditional' chemical bee disease medications.

The prevailing modus operandi these days is to leverage natural evolutionary processes. I.e. let weak hive fail and therefor let undesirable genes phase out.

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"As other have noted, splitting is a natural process of beekeeping."

Uh, splitting is very much not natural (at least, I'm taking this to mean artificial splits - if you're saying swarming is a form of splitting, which isn't unreasonable even if it's not the wording I'd use, then disregards this comment). It's part of 20th century beekeeping, yes, but swarming is natural bee behavior, and unnatural practices like splitting, queen clipping, brood cutting, sugar feeding etc. are creating fragile colonies with weak resistance that depend on human intervention (including chemical varroa treatment) to survive.

And this is not just ideology, this is the trend in all apiculture/bee entomology journals over the last say 5 years.

If you have a strong hive, do you let it swarm or do you intervene and split it?

(for the uninitiated, good hives grow to the point that the queen and half the hive leave to make a new colony, then you have a 50/50 chance the original hive will raise a new queen, that the queen will mate and make it back to the hive without been eaten)

Let me expand my original statement for clarification. splitting leverages the natural process of swarming in the field of beekeeping.

As to some of the other 'interventions' you mention I politely disagree. It's sort of like saying cows are weak in Canada because farmers don't let them freeze to death in winter.

I recently had a hive attacked by ants. They lost a lot of food and brood. Do I let them head into fall and winter with little to no chance of survival? The fact the ants got into the colony was no fault of the bees, just bad luck.

There's survival of the fittest and there's animal husbandry. The two aren't completely incompatible.

They are largely incompatible. The ideal animal husbandry model is different for populations that are going to be culled without breeding. Ex: Veal.

Useing similar methods on fast breeding species where you keep the offspring is a very bad idea long term. The only way to keep things stable is to have breeders who focus on culling the weak. But, you need a large breeding population to maintain genetic diversity.

This shift is happening, but I see it far too slowly, still. At least in my area, the dominate beekeepers who do it for commercial enterprise (and have the majority of all hives) still treat because they are protecting their income. Hobbyists are more quickly adopting treatment-free methods which I think is accelerating this trend.

I wonder if this is region specific. It isn't a thing here in New Zealand. My understanding is that the US has a very genetically diverse bee population with many different genetic strains available. A strength and weakness of being remote down here is that we don't necessarily get the diseases, but we don't have the genetic pool available to fight diseases when they arrive. The mites are a colossal problem here.

This was literally from the article.

> “You create new hives by breaking up your stronger hives, which just makes them weaker,” said Tim May, a beekeeper in Harvard, Illinois and the vice-president of the American Beekeeping Federation based in Atlanta.

There are many ways to split hives, the way we've been doing it to combat CCD is creating weaker hives (and thus more susceptible to mites and other diseases).

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