Pests and diseases should always be seen and welcomed as friends and allies, not as adversaries to be destroyed.
This guy's site has tons of articles to educate others how to raise bees in a commercial environment, without using any pesticides or chemicals. Very interesting
Here's an excerpt from one of his articles:
"Despite two years of terrible weather, and no treatments of any kind since 2002, the stability and resilience of the apiary continues to slowly improve. The cycles of collapse and recovery (now caused primarily by extreme weather rather than by mites or diseases) in the end help to build the apiary rather than tear it down. Doing the queen rearing work during the rainy summer of 2009 was not as pleasant as other years, but the results were surprisingly good, and the colony count grew from 340 to 1000 during this time. (Remember, many of those colonies are nucleus colonies intended for overwintering.) The last cycle of brood was very healthy looking, and only about 20 colonies were deemed non-viable and blown out in December. Severe weather has made some serious inroads into the amount of honey and nucleus colonies available for sale during the last two years, but the steadily increasing value of those commodities (especially those from untreated apiaries) has compensated for this somewhat, and a positive cash flow has been maintained without too much trouble."
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