What happens when you give bees exactly what they need - and nothing they don't
Some beekeepers chase production numbers. Others chase survival rates. A few chase something harder: the ability to keep bees without treatments, exactly as nature intended.
For twenty years, Vanya has been testing one question: can colonies survive and thrive without chemical or therapeutic interventions if you give them the right conditions?
The answer keeps surprising him.
"I started beekeeping almost twenty years ago with one main goal," Vanya says. "To raise bees using a treatment-free approach and to understand firsthand how severe the crisis really is - how dangerous their lives truly are in the world."
He'd heard about the threats from all sides - magnetic fields, agricultural chemicals killing entire colonies. But he wanted to know something specific: do bees actually need help from beekeepers?
The journey started in Moldova, working alongside his father-in-law in greenhouse heat. "It's intense heat and humidity, and at the end of the day you're exhausted," Vanya recalls. After that grueling work, his father-in-law would invite him to help with the beehives - lifting equipment, extracting honey. "It was basically slave labor. I hated it."
When they moved to Be'er Sheva in Israel's Negev Desert, Vanya thought that chapter was closed. Desert conditions. No bees.
Then his father-in-law came to him one day: "I'm a happy man, Yona. I have everything. But the one thing I miss is my bees."
Vanya told him it was impossible. "We're in the Negev. There are no bees here."
But his father-in-law kept bringing it up. And he'd brought all his beekeeping books from Moldova.
The switch flips
Vanya started reading. By chance, he encountered an American book claiming it was possible to raise bees without treatments, with almost no human intervention.
"I became obsessed."
The classic texts taught him something fundamental: every climate has bees adapted to it. He started looking around Be'er Sheva with new eyes - public gardens, private gardens, eucalyptus trees providing abundant forage.
Then a wild swarm showed up in one of the gardens where he worked.
That's when he started his systematic collection - going through the entire Gaza envelope area, all the surrounding kibbutzim, pulling swarms from under houses, from business buildings, from shutters and walls.
He wanted bees that had already proven they could survive on their own.
The Primal Bee connection
The beekeeping world is small.
Around 2010, Vanya's relatives in Italy had children in the same kindergarten as Gianmario's (one of Primal Bee's founders). Someone made the introduction.
Gianmario came to Israel to test the design under hot desert climate conditions. After the visit, Vanya traveled to Italy to see their development work. They gave him eight early Primal Bee frames and the specifications for building the wooden hive body.
Vanya returned to Israel, assembled the frames, and built the first prototype.
"Then it started. Then it became history."
Like fire catching
The first thing Vanya noticed was speed.
"The development of the colonies is very fast. You know, it's like fire that ignites and then it catches you, and things multiply."
The population growth in his Primal Bee hives was dramatically faster than anything he'd seen in Langstroth.
But there was something else that had never happened with his other hives.
"At cold temperatures, I put my hand under the entrance, and warm air comes out, just like from an oven."
In Langstroth hives, any heat the bees produce immediately escapes. That's when Vanya understood something fundamentally different was happening - the construction itself was doing something his other equipment couldn't do.
The immune system equation
For Vanya, everything comes down to one point: the bees' immune system.
The problem with standard hives is fundamental. Bees can't maintain the optimal temperature of 35°C inside the nest because all the heat escapes. The cold walls meet hot air from the bee cluster, creating condensation, dripping, mold.
"Because of the accumulation and high temperatures, it produces mold in the hive, which causes disease. In such conditions, neither your body nor mine is built for it, and of course, the same goes for bees."
Primal Bee's design came from studying hollow tree trunks - where bees naturally manage their microclimate much more easily.
The hive acts like an inverted thermos. Every drop of energy the bees produce for heat stays inside, maintaining optimal conditions without constant work.
Year-round brood without winter break
In his Primal Bee hives at Be'er Sheva: "We don't have winter in the big picture. The queen is always laying."
Other beekeepers in the same climate running Langstroth hives seal them almost completely, leaving just a small entrance. If it were fully open, the colony would spend all its energy maintaining temperature.
Vanya's Primal Bee hives? Fully open from the bottom, 100% open. No mesh floor. And the brood pattern stays consistent and strong.
This changed everything about his beekeeping calendar.
The standard Israeli protocol: replace queens in October or November. But Vanya's Primal Bee colonies develop so well through summer that he can split and re-queen right after the breeding season ends - June, July, August.
"I have heat, I still have food in nature, I still have high-quality males in the hives - everything I need."
By splitting three to four months earlier than other Israeli beekeepers, he arrives at winter with strong, untreated colonies ready to survive.
The 40°C test
At around 40°C (104°F), conventional hives show all the expected behaviors: thick beards at the entrance, halted foraging, bees frantically hauling water for evaporative cooling.
His Primal Bee colonies? "Even at temperatures around 40°C, the bees do not form a beard at the entrance, remain active whenever nectar is available, and hardly collect water for cooling."
They were just working. Like it was a normal day.
Vanya understands the mechanics precisely. The difference between optimal (35°C) and suboptimal (33°C) seems small - just 2-3 degrees. But for parasites, those few degrees matter exponentially.
"Just two degrees from 35 to 33, and they already start to spread exponentially."
When temperatures stay optimal, parasites can't gain footholds. Same with diseases - without excess moisture and high humidity accumulation, fungus doesn't have the conditions to develop.
Every inspection still surprises him
After building eight wooden Primal Bee hives from 2010 onwards, after years running ten new-generation hives alongside his custom ones, Vanya has seen a lot.
But: "Every inspection still surprises me."
What keeps surprising him is watching bees do exactly what they're designed to do when you remove the obstacles. The brood chamber is sufficient for brood, pollen, and the colony's own honey needs. No queen excluder needed. Excess honey moves naturally into the honey supers.
"Once the honey is capped, I remove it for extraction."
That's the whole management protocol.
Six years of transparency
For six years, Vanya has run a WhatsApp group of Israeli beekeepers, sharing everything - successes, failures, observations.
When people ask challenging questions, he opens his hives and films with his phone camera. Someone recently asked whether the bottom of the tall brood chamber stays cold with moisture accumulation.
"Today I opened the hive and put the camera all the way down to the bottom. Everything is dry, everything is clean. There's nothing to hide. You can walk with confidence and show people the truth."
The main objection? "The price is high."
His response: "You want a Mercedes or you want a Subaru? You have to pay for it."
The natural selection principle
Treatment-free beekeeping is very difficult. Most beekeepers who attempt it return to chemical treatments because colony losses become unsustainable.
Vanya references Tom Seeley's research at Cornell University. Seeley studied wild bee populations in forests for twenty years.
When Varroa first arrived in the United States, Seeley's own managed research colonies were devastated - from 20 hives, only two or three survived. He thought his career studying treatment-free beekeeping was over.
But Seeley also tracked wild bee populations living in tree cavities in the Arnot Forest. Twenty years after Varroa's arrival, he made a remarkable discovery: there were still the same number of wild colonies per square kilometer as before. The population density hadn't changed.
What had changed was genetic diversity. Before Varroa, there were 24 distinct genetic lineages in the forest. Twenty years later, only three remained.
Those three were resistant to Varroa.
"Nature made the selection and kept the genes that know how to handle Varroa."
This year, Vanya lost three hives out of twenty. The remaining seventeen are in excellent condition - strong, healthy, untreated.
"At the beginning, if a family just survived winter, it would already be a success. Today, my goal is to bring strong colonies into the season - large enough that they immediately start working."
His Primal Bee colonies give him that edge. When bees aren't wasting energy on thermal regulation, when they maintain optimal temperatures for development, parasites struggle and natural immunity has a real chance.
The future
Vanya believes Primal Bee could transform who keeps bees.
"Today, the age of beekeepers is stuck. Younger folks don't want to go there. It's a lot of work with chemicals. You have to know when to add them, at what temperature."
With conventional methods, you need to be a “professional veterinarian.” Compare that to Primal Bee: "You put bees there. You know in advance that they are resistant to Varroa. They will have pests - they will be there - but they know how to deal with it."
The accessibility changes everything. "I can put up my hive, not come near it for two months, and the bees will do their job."
After two decades of testing the limits of chemical-free colony management, Vanya describes the system as revolutionary. His commitment speaks to that: he built eight wooden hives by hand just to run the frame format years before the current generation, and those of the Primal Bee hive existed.
As for the bees - they tell the rest of the story themselves: thriving in desert conditions where conventional hives struggle, producing honey from unstressed colonies given exactly what they need.
Vanya's apiary in Israel, where citrus trees provide forage and his mix of Primal Bee hives and custom-built wooden hives operate side by side under desert conditions.
