Help! :shock: Either my ladies have become radical feminists or do I have problems looming? :shock: (JK) :-D 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? :roll: