You may try opening up one of the deformed flower buds to see if there is a pest inside. A magnifier would help also when you look.

hemerocallis gall midge mite is the culprit. its a tiny fly that lays its eggs. the small maggots eat away inside and then this causes the deformity.
no commercial sprays for the amateur unfortunately.
early flowers are affected as the fly emerges may .
advice from the rhs is to pick off the 'fat' buds and destroy them.
later in the season the flowers will be fine.

I also find this, the early bud are quite fat and distorted but after I pick them off the rest are fine. Thanks for the explanation SBG

Also, when you pick the buds off, throw them in the garbage and not a compost heap. The maggots drop to the ground and live there, then the midge emerges to lay eggs on the daylily buds. They would be very happy in the compost pile.

yes I learnt that the hard way wylieintheazores, that's why I know destroy them :o)

We have gradually removed most of our Hemerocallis. Cannot see the point of great big clumps of leaves with no flowers and despite saying that the later ones do not get it, ours do.
We burned the infected flowers when we removed them.

Thanks all, I'll have a good look tomorrow when it should have stopped raining.
I'll report back as to what I find.

very early or the later flowering varieties seem to avoid it I find.

I snipped of both flower stems and checked inside each bud. Nothing to be seen but they were rather mushy inside.
Now all in the bin, I shall see what happens next year. No other daylily seems to be effected.

Yes it's only the early varieties that are affected I was very vigilant last year picking off any suspicious looking bud and this year I haven't found it so bad, last year I was picking off ice cream tubs full.

Thanks Simbad - I don't have many and not sure whether they would be considered early or late - they all flower around the same time.

In this country earlies start mid to late June, mids start July and lates are anytime up to the end of August :-), there are even some early varieties now that rebloom so if early flowers are affected by gall midge you can often get a later rebloom that's not affected.

Thanks for the explaination Simbad. I think mine all must be mids, as they are all just getting ready to flower.