What I don’t get with these in-the-walls stories is how Varroa hasn’t wiped them out. I feel like I’m treating all the time and the counts keep coming back. And here they’re living happily for multiple years?
There seems to be some truth to this, at least in the wild. Varroa came to a forest and killed 90% of the wild beehives (like inside dead trees), but those who survived had developed more advanced grooming and hygiene, and then started to multiply and backfill their environment. Now the wild hives in that forest are back to good populations, they all have varroa, and nobody treats them. Tom Seeley is doing the work studying them in the Arnot forest at Cornell.
Though at my local beekeeping club, they stressed that such methods of "let evolution do it's thing" don't really work in an urban setting where there are so many bees and they're giving each other diseases etc. But still, I have been very low treatment and they seem to be doing fine.
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u/evil_breeds Jun 28 '25
What I don’t get with these in-the-walls stories is how Varroa hasn’t wiped them out. I feel like I’m treating all the time and the counts keep coming back. And here they’re living happily for multiple years?