Does it matter how drone brood removal is conducted?

In my local bee club, there seem to be two schools of thought among those who practice drone brood removal.  The hobbyist/suburban beekeepers tend to pull the frames and freeze them, drones, mites and all.  The more rural beekeepers with chickens cut the drone brood out of the frame and drop it on the ground for their birds, then put the frame back in the hive.  I have always assumed that both techniques were functionally identical.  (The freezers let the colony recapture some protein at the risk of some chilled brood while the chicken-feeders stay warm but have to re-draw all that wax.  But either way, all the mites were dead.)  The recent discussion about the mite lifecycle is making me question that assumption.
Can the mites escape from the comb before they are eaten by the chickens?  If they do escape, presumably they will reinfest the apiary.  Might this explain the reported inconsistencies in the effectiveness of drone brood removal as a technique?  Or do we have reasonable confidence that the mites really are being eaten by the chickens?  (I'm a freezer myself so unfortunately I can't run the experiment.) Mike Rossander  

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