> Being ignorant about diagnosing hive kills by mites, could ya'll provide some pointers

Typically, the hive will not be dead when you find it, but on the way down. The brood will be ugly, with coiled up dead larvae, pupae with their heads chewed off, etc. There will usually be mites in the brood. Later, after the bees are gone, these same things will be visible: dead brood, chewed pupae, dead mites on dead brood, etc. 

Often the hive gets robbed out. In time, much of this evidence disappears but not completely. Compare this to starvation, hive fizzling out, foulbrood, etc. which have an entirely different appearance. A clean deadout is not too common, there is usually some evidence pointing to the cause of its demise. 

That's what made the initial reports of CCD so odd, it didn't fit any of the usual descriptions. They reported large areas of healthy brood, few bees and a normal looking queen. No dead bees near the hive as in a typical pesticide kill. Of course, having the bees disappear en masse only adds to the difficulty in pinpointing the cause. But mites usually leave evidence all over the place.

PLB

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