>The fact that mites don't reproduce on certain brood may be of benefit but there is no reason to suppose it's anything more than an anomaly of some sort.

This is where context is important. In the paper under consideration, we are talking about the results of testing viable brood in representative sample colonies from populations exhibiting long-term survival via the mitigation of explosive mite population growth.

So we are now trying to understand what mechanism(s) are at work in these colonies and observing a statistically relevant difference in mite reproduction in the absence of adult  hygiene behavior.

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