One thing is clear.  Mites get from one hive to another somehow.  If not we would not have a mite problem at all.  So, a hive with a lot of mites is going to move more mites around than a hive with very few mites simply due to numbers.  Things like drifting, robbing or absconding are likely to move them very unequally.  They have to move on bees going from one hive to another unless the bee keeper moves frames of bees.  I have not heard any evidence they move on frames from honey supers.  If there was a mite on a frame of honey I would think extraction would remove them.  They sure do not crawl from one hive to another.

Dick

" Any discovery made by the human mind can be explained in its essentials to the curious learner."  Professor Benjamin Schumacher talking about teaching quantum mechanics to non scientists.   "For every complex problem there is a solution which is simple, neat and wrong."  H. L. Mencken

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