Trying to go as chemical free as possible on this, I really do not want to use checkmite or apistan but... My biggest hive has varroa. I am unsure the count but as I went into the hive on Tuesday I notice some bees with deformed wings. I checked closer due to most of the time it being caused by varroa. So I checked and saw several mites on bees. So since I was leaving for vacation the next day I did a powdered sugar shake. Since I am up at the in-laws I had access to tools that I do not have at home and made some nucs as I wanted to have them on hand anyway. So reading a lot on control, but will be able to read more when I am back home. What would be the best way to treat for them without using chemicals such as checkmite?
1. Split the hive
2. Powder sugar in about 10 days after split
3. Move to foundationless frames (which I have already been using some)
What about the one split with the queen how will it affect her hive with not really breaking the brood cycle? Will this get them out of the hive completely?
As has been pointed out already, all of your hives have varroa. Like all bee pests and diseases, varroa is not something that moves into the otherwise pristine and sterile hive. The critical thing to understand, if you want to use chemicals as little as possible, is that the pests and diseases are ALWAYS present in every hive. But in a healthy hive, other bugs and microbes, as well as the bees' hygienic behavior, limits the reproduction of the pests and their impact on your colonies.
The only ways to treat without chemicals are mechanical methods (drone trapping, sugar dusting, screened bottom boards) and genetic methods (breeding for hygienic behavior, breeding from untreated survivors).
You've got some helpful strategies listed in your post, but you missed the most important tool: do a mite drop when you get back to check what the actual level of mites is, rather than worrying because you spotted a few of mites on bees. If your drop suggests you're over the treatment threshold, then proceed with mechanical methods.
Splitting the hive doesn't do anything by itself, but the half without a queen undergoes a brood break which leaves the mites fewer places to hide. During this time you can use sugar dusting to induce the bees to groom, knocking some of the mites out of the hive. This only works if you have screened bottom boards, and in my opinion only works really well if you also have either a long fall to the ground or a sticky trap under the screen (mites can crawl). You can do sugar dusting any time, but it's most effective when there is no brood because the mites are out in the open and because there are fewer larvae killed by the desiccating action of the powder.
The half with the queen does not get the benefit of a brood break, but you can do repeated sugar dusting (once a week for three weeks) to get some of that effect. For both halves, go ahead and dust the first time right when you do the split.
While you're on foundation, you can also use a plastic drone trapping frame. Insert one of these into a foundation-only hive in the summer and the bees will go nuts filling it with drone brood. As soon as the majority of cells are capped (and well before any of them emerge), remove the frame and freeze, then either scrape or return to the hive for cleaning. Varroa love drone brood, and in a foundation-only hive you can lure a substantial fraction of the reproducing mites into drone cells and take them out of the hive that way.
Foundationless keeping sortof helps.... Some people believe that bees reared in smaller-celled comb are better able to groom themselves, or that there is a slight shortening of the maturation time of pupae which helps bend the mite growth curve. Neither of these ideas have been proven, and it takes either several generations of frame replacement or shaking out onto small-cell foundation to regress bees to the point where they draw substantially smaller comb. Some people keep chemical free bees in all foundationless successfully...some people keep chemical free bees on all standard foundation successfully.
The key to having your hives thrive alongside varroa in the long term is genetics. You need to either buy or breed bees which do not dwindle and die when exposed to varroa and the diseases they vector. Isle of Wight disease, caused by tracheal mites, nearly wiped out all of the bees in England in the first decade of the 20th century. Modern bees are largely resistant to tracheal mites, which are omnipresent in hives but typically don't kill strong, healthy hives. The same thing can be done with varroa. If you don't want to use chemicals, then don't. Some of your hives will develop crushing mite loads and die out. Some will survive. Breed from the survivors.
This is tough on a keeper with few hives, because each loss hurts. There's nothing wrong with using some chemicals, whether pesticides or essential oils, if you feel you must - though using them will not rid the hive of mites and you will be facing exactly the same problem each year. The one thing that doesn't work is leaving hives untreated, and then jumping in with pesticides to "save" an overwhelmed colony. Not only will you have to make that choice again and again for a colony which cannot tolerate varroa, but you will also be selecting very efficiently for pesticide-resistant mites.
If you don't want to put the work and money into breeding your own survivors, there are more apiaries out there now selling packages and queens from untreated stock. It might be worth the initial investment to get some bees that have already demonstrated their ability to flourish in spite of varroa. But ask pointed questions about what they consider "treatment free" and how long they have survived without treatment. It should be a bare minimum of three or four years, and FGMO, thymol, formic acid etc all count as chemical treatments in my book.
