treatment-free – Keeping Backyard Bees

Are Honey Bees Domesticated Livestock?

Scott Offord — Fri, 21 Jul 2017 10:43:06 +0000

In the debate between treatment-free and treating beekeepers, the statement and question has been posed many time before… “The bees you have are not ‘feral’, they are being kept in an unnatural state, their genetics have been affected by man for thousands of years, so why not take care of your ‘animals’ when they are […]

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Top 5 Reasons Not to Treat Your Bees With Chemicals

Scott Offord — Tue, 18 Jul 2017 11:30:28 +0000

If you’ve kept bees for any length of time, you’ve probably come to realize that doing so effectively requires a lot of work. In particular, bees are often vulnerable to disease as well as mites and other pests. Controlling these threats may be quite difficult, and many beekeepers opt to enlist the help of chemical […]

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Treatment-Free Beekeeping and the Varroa Mite

Scott Offord — Thu, 27 Apr 2017 12:56:29 +0000

The Varroa mite is a Pandora’s box that humans will never be able to close. They are here to stay and they aren’t going anywhere despite all our efforts to treat them away. According to USDA’s Report on Honey Bee Health (PDF), published in 2012, the parasitic mite, Varroa destructor, remains the single most detrimental […]

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Treatment-Free Beekeeping Explained

Scott Offord — Thu, 20 Apr 2017 15:06:46 +0000

In order to explain treatment-free beekeeping in a manner that is productive, it is first necessary to understand that there are many definitions of what exactly “treatment-free” means. In this article, I bring to light various opinions that exist and put forth a definition that attempts to clarify the topic of treatment-free beekeeping for the […]

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Bees-First Beekeeping: Part I–Mites, Wax, and Sex

Susan Chernak McElroy — Wed, 14 Sep 2016 20:20:04 +0000

For the past hundred years, we've been keeping bees according to what works best for beekeepers. What would it look like if we began putting the bees' desires and needs first? It looks something like this...

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