> The more important practical question is how much does 
> drone brood contribute to varroa mite population increases 
> compared to worker brood.

I do not see the utility of worrying about a "normal hive", with a "normal"
ratio of worker brood to drone brood cells (roughly 10%? 15%?), as we know
that this scenario does not end well for the bees.

If one slides in a drone-cell sized (green) Perico frame, one is creating an
unnaturally larger number of drone cells, and the general experience is that
this practice alone, diligently managed, is an excellent, but
labor-intensive, and time-critical way to keep varroa down to what seems
acceptable numbers.

So, while we do not have a good equation to apply to a "normal" hive, we do
have a good idea of the relative attractiveness of drone brood, when there
is no shortage of open drone brood cells.

While this sounds simple and elegant, it relies on perhaps the most
unreliable resource imaginable - the beekeeper and his help.  I cannot
imagine how any operation of any size could keep up with all this, as:

a)  It is impossible to keep all hives together based upon date of
drone-comb insertion.
b)  It is impossible to expect perfect employee performance on removing the
drone combs in a timely manner.
c)  The tracking of hives is easy, the LOCATING of hives to discover the
ones that need drone comb removed is difficult.

I do not know the largest operation to use this strategy, but I would sure
like to see their tracking scheme.

I confess - we sometimes overlooked entire yards until I bought a set of
Garmin Hiking GPS units and started logging each visit by each vehicle to
each yard through the simple expedient of leaving the "breadcrumbs"
("Tracklog") feature turned on, and uploading each unit's tracklog memory to
a spreadsheet each day.   One could do the same today with cellphone-based
GPS.

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