a Charles snip...
How can we not know the answer to this yet??  I am surprised that no one has
autopsied mites yet??  (I would if it were any where near my skill set)

I have heard many times "we don't know how it works"  is this really true,
or are we just not discussing it in public?   Surely someone you know has
the skills and tools to investigate dead mites?

My comments...
to somewhat paraphrase Betrand Russel's (The History of Western Philosophy) writing.... science as we know it from the times of the Greeks to the Renaissance did not provide much real insight or value since the tendency then was to try to figure out god'a influence in things by posing the question as 'why'.  From the Renaissance onward science has provides us with much insight and large value primarily because they question was alter to 'how'.   seems like a minor alteration in formulating a question but one would be foolish to argue with the obvious end results.  so the question 'how' demands a function or mechanism to fully understand how something works.  science may know one thing interacts with something else (and quite often in a very complex way as any of Randy's flow diagrams might demonstrate) but this does not mean science absolutely has figured out exactly the mechanism of the interaction.

As an example.... you commonly hear folks say that varroa has a preference for drone brood due ti the longer capping time required for drone to mature and emerge.  This is of course logical nonsense since varroa does not 'know' that one cells will take a longer or shorter time to mature.  What varroa does do (at this time my understanding of the mechanism involved) is it senses the juvenile growth hormone which is much higher in drones than either worker bees or queens.  This is also why varroa is much more attractive to old comb (which absorbs JGH) and not so much to new comb.  I myself suspect this may answer a lot of question concerning varroa attraction to one hive and not another and to the observation of how specific lines of bees may appear resistant at one location collapse at another location < the obvious overlooked variable here is time.

Of course as science collect more data we may find this interaction is not exactly as describe by me above and may be quite a bit more complex than stated.   

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