I live barely south of you.  I am in NE Ohio about the latitude of Monroe.  I have collected a number of swarms over the years that I was convinced were ferals and never been able to see any mite resistance at all in any of them when compared to domestics.  I will admit that those swarms were all over fifteen years ago as since then there are no ferals left locally it seems.  The mites killed all of them.  The swarms you find more recently all look like domestics, not uncommon to even have a marked queen.  I have talked to several guys who cut trees for a living and asked how often they find a tree with a colony of honey bees in it.  The answer is never.  Or one said, "I think we had one maybe five or six years ago."  Think about that a minute.  These are guys who are cutting sick and hollow trees every day and find no honey bee colonies.  We have no shortage of hollow trees.  Every beech is hollow by the time it is eight inches in diameter and most of our sugar maples are hollow by the time they are 18 inches in diameter.

I think if you want ferals with some mite resistance you need to look about 300 miles south of where you live.  But, I would expect those ferals to die pretty promptly if you took them to Detroit.

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