When I visited Macedonia about 10 years ago I was very interested in learning from each beekeeper their experience and thoughts concerning Varroa. Everyone that I talked to expressed the same thought, and that was that Varroa was much worse when it had first arrived. Varroa had entered Macedonia about 15 years before I visited the country. It appears to me that this trend is also happening here in the U.S., that is, the devastation is not as bad as 10 years ago. No we don't have 90 percent of our colonies regularly surviving the Winter, at least without treatment with some miticide. However, we do have more colonies surviving Winter, or at least lasting until late Winter before they die - all signs that there is some resistance developing within our strains of bees. Not enough to get our bees regularly though a northern Winter, but I think we are making progress. Natural selection is at work even though we don't see the end result that we desire.
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