Cannibal Bees??

The past couple of days when I have went out to look at the bees, I have noticed a worker fighting with another worker?bee (it doesn't look like a drone to me). It appears the aggressor has bitten or torn most of the wing structure off and proceeds to carry them a little ways away from the hive entrance. These wounded bees can still walk, but ultimately are doomed. So what is going on here? Are the bees that are being mutilated robbers, drones, unhealthy workers or something else? I have witnessed this maybe three times in the last three days, but otherwise the hive seems to be doing well. Any thoughts??

I saw a lot of this going on with my hives this fall. My assumption is robbers since I've had some difficulty with that but I don't know for sure.

Robbers will fight back... Bees infected by viruses or such are much more passive and take being bitten and dragged by thier sisters... They often will look greazy or have abnormal wings to begin with so watch if they are really fighting or just trying to get away

Do the wings look like the pic in this link? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deformed_wing_virus

Hi Andy, Sounds like bees fighting with robbers to me too. Lots of hungry bees out there right before winter sets in.

The picture that johng found on wikipedia does look like what I saw, but I can't tell for sure. After reading the wiki entry, the deformed wing virus sounds pretty bad, but it also appears that the healthy worker/guard bees kick out the deformed bees on purpose to safeguard the rest of the hive. I have not done any official mite counts, but I have not seen a lot of evidence for them either. In late August my hive swarmed, so the brood cycle got interrupted and hopefully cut down on the number of mites that are present. Unfortunately the weather is getting cold pretty fast up here, so there is not much going on outside the hive right now. If it warms up at all, I will continue to keep an eye out for this again, but I am sure I won't be doing a real hive inspection again until spring, unless we have a winter like we did last year!