Everybody agrees to the principle of natural beekeeping and the wonderful things we can do with the bees, but the reality is as follows. With the severity and the sheer virulence of many of the pests that our honeybees face today, they cannot survive without the serious help and assistance of beekeepers. Natural beekeeping is wonderful. You can put your spearmint oil into a hive, and yes, you may get 10% control over your mites. I'm not worried about the 10%. I'm worried about the non-efficacy of the 90%.
It has been proven over and over again that, for better or worse—and again, I don't want to sound too negative—beekeepers who tend to follow that strategy generally lose their bees fairly quickly. It's not just that. When these bees are harbouring all these diseases, it's not that they die from one day to the next. They basically die slowly, and they export all these diseases to other colonies.
On Vancouver Island, I've heard so many times commercial beekeepers being utterly frustrated, because they're doing everything right, except the rate of reinfestation into their colonies is terrible. There are quite a lot of small-time, hobby beekeepers who basically have their natural, philosophical approach to beekeeping, and the result of it is that these bees die.