jcdsgn,
Pretty much all the responses that you have received to your question about deformed wings on your bees have focused on treating them quickly with one method or another to reduce the mite load before winter. The majority of responses also offered a poor prognosis for their ability to make it through the winter, even with treatment.
I don't know how you feel about treating for mites, or if you are willing to let the bees deal with them without treatments of any kind, or not deal with them. I run all my bees totally treatment free in regards to mites, no chemicals, vapors, essential oils, sugar dusting, drone frames, screened bottom boards, or any other gadget or conconction I'm not familiar with. I let them draw natural comb in foundationless frames. I also do not use anything other than ordinary Italian stock. I think most of my hives that have been around for more than a couple years have mites to some degree, I don't do mite drop counts. I know that some even have DWV and have had it for over a couple years, with no observable impact on production or colony strength, that's a fact. I know some hives have DWV because occasionally I see a few bees crawling around in the grass in front of the hive. I inspect my hives frequently and spend alot of time in my bee yards studying individual hive activity at the entrances, and I have yet to actually see a bee with DWV in the hive or on the landing board, just in the grass.
Simply seeing bees with DWV around your hives in the grass does not, let me repeat, does not mean that those hives are going to collapse and not make the winter. If that was always true, I should have experienced massive losses by now, but that's not the case.
This is how I see it, treating does nothing to enable the honey bee to cope with mites on their own, period. Anything you do treatment-wise to remove a mite population from a hive has no long term benefit to getting a resistant bee stock developed. In order to get on the right path to a resistant stock, you have got to let the bees deal with mites on their own, some will and some won't. The ones that do you breed from, just like many are doing today.
So you have to decide if you want to contribute, whether you have one hive or a thousand, to getting off the treatment grind, and developing a truly resistant bee. The choice is yours right now. John