http://www.treatmentfreebeekeeping.org/
I’m planning on going as my birthday present to myself. I see @Michael_Bush is going to be presenting which will be great to see.
I’d love to see him too.
Some of the other speakers seem a bit…strange. but that’s just my opinion.
I just put Jacqueline Freeman’s book on my Kindle.
In 2010 the bees began communicating with Jacqueline Freeman
Must be worth a read at least 
I tried ploughing through Steiner’s book on biodynamic beekeeping but gave up. I found some of the ideas quite shocking !!
Some of the other speakers seem a bit…strange. but that’s just my opinion.
LOL. Dee wants to give everyone their say. You can always skip those and talk to people outside of the main room. Just the conversations are worth the trip.
Dee Steiner is hard yakka - some principles are good some are loopy
I have got half way through this…
It’s strangely compelling
@adagna
Perhaps you can go to her talk and report back
I’m looking forward to seeing the presentations and talk to people there. So I will definitely report back after about what I learned. I am not terribly familiar with the other presenters but I will have to look into them and their books in the next two months
This was well worth the trip. I learned some great information for how to responsibly go treatment free. Unfortunately Jacqueline Freeman wasn’t there but someone from her group was and the talk was very interesting. The principles behind it have merit even if you aren’t a big enough hippie to buy it all lol. It was great to meet everyone there.
What did you learn?
Can you share?
Please
Wow that is a tough one. There was so much information over the 3 days.
But I would say that the most useful information was about bee regression to small cell so that you have a naturally sized bee. And the relationship between these small bees, natural sized cells, and their ability to limit and coexist with Varroa. With standard foundation your worker cells are only about 1mm off of drone comb, and everyone rails on how horrible drones are for spreading and “breeding” Varroa. But on standard foundation comb all of your cells are basically drone comb in the eyes of the mites. The other side of the Varroa issue is that with all the treatments we have been doing, and the general ineffectiveness of those treatments all we have really achieved is a super mite that is pesticide resistant and larger and more voracious then it used to be. A lot of the information kind of dove tails, so on top of having naturally sized bees, the use of local feral bees and queens that are locally/wild bred to encourage genetic diversity was the other aspect of making the treatment free technique work. You can’t expect an inbred genetically weak queen to be successful in any situation let alone with pests and parasites to deal with.
I may be over simplifying but it was a lot of information to condense into a summary. And I am still doing my own research to build up my own knowledge about the subject so I am far from an expert on it.
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