The uncapping, recapping, removal of brood with some sort of malady by honey bees has been known for a long time.  Similarly, the effects of the different components have been quantified to produce a reasonable understanding of the important variables.  Simply put, uncapping and recapping of mite infested brood has a slight effect on reproduction of the mites left behind untouched, but is highly variable and does not curb growth of mite populations in whole colonies to a very useful degree, at least not to the level of highly selected colonies for VSH.   In many ways recapping is an imperfect form of the behavior, likely in the early stages of selection for the much more effective targeting of infested cells that have viable reproduction of daughter mites.

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