I was talking over lunch today with Ron Hoskins, who is engaged in a project to select hygienic bees in his part of the UK (Swindon).  Like me, he had looked at the dropped mites through a lens and observed that a proportion of them were damaged.  I had observed that the proportion of damaged mites increased over time and so had he.  However, he went beyond what I had done as he was monitoring more hives and noticed that whereas one hive was dropping about 4% damaged mites, another was dropping 60% damaged. So he swapped queens.  After a break of a few weeks to get a new set of young bees in each hive, the proportions of damaged mites reversed, following the queens.

Thus mite-damaging behavior is inherited and therefore selectable rather than learned behavior.

Chris

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