Help!
Either my ladies have become radical feminists or do I have problems looming?
(JK)
Actually I have a question or two. From what I've been able to learn, hygenic queens produce bees that can detect varroa in the brood and will abort them as a means of control. I haven't seen any bees with malformed wings in the hive and a sugar shake showed a number well below the economic threshold. They are a feral hive I got from a birdhouse, so they were a small colony of barely 4 frames. I hived them with a SBB and haven't seen piles of dead bees around the hive, only 5-6 a day or less. A few of them have "K" wing, but not many. I know that if 10% of the bees have "K" wing it is usually indicitative of a trachaeal mite infestation and not varroa. Also, TM's don't infest the brood. They just haven't built up like I think they should and the abortion rate isn't helping.
What does "K" wing indicate other than TM's, and what else (if anything, besides varroa) could be causing them to abort brood?
