"alternative is do nothing"
That is exactly what most selective honey bee breeding programs do.  The problem with truly breeding bees is if you do not control the drone population you are not breeding.  You are simply reproducing the local drone population.  It has clearly been proven that some traits are dirt easy to breed for such as low swarming tendency and higher average honey production.  With those you can make reasonable progress in six or eight years with a population of someplace between 25 and 50 hives as has been demonstrated.  Then there are tough nuts like varroa.  I doubt if a population under 500 hives is enough to make progress based on what many have observed.  And even when you have the right population like Randy, or others, the progress is so slow that not many will keep up the effort for 20 years.  We know it is at least 20 years.  Look at Harbo's results, or Purdue's results or Randy's results.  As I recall Purdue has now been at it about 20 years and are no place even close to having fixed the mite biting trait even with single drone II.  If it is that hard to fix by II what happens in an open apiary?  It is lost in the first generation.  Those of us with no more than 25 hives might entertain ourselves thinking we are going to make progress on mite resistance, but IMO that is a pipe dream unsupported entirely by the actual evidence from the field.  I come to this conclusion after a life time of breeding easy critters like pigeons and fish where controlling paternity is dirt easy and you are not dealing with polyandry.  Even in such easy critters I have scrapped more than one genetics study simply because I was going to have to raise several thousand young to have enough data to have any hope of sorting out what was going on.  And those cases were phenotypes I was tearing apart rather than trying to put them together.  It must have taken millions of young to put them together.  I also come to the same conclusions by looking at what it has taken to develop superior corn and soy bean seeds or superior milk production in cattle.  In all cases progress came by testing tens or hundreds of thousands of individuals.  In cattle the first step today is to do a SNP assay on a few million sites and dumping the data into a puter to do massive correlation analyses.  But, that is only possible because of a SNP data base of thousands and thousands of cattle with known productivity.

If you can not go big you are not going to go anyplace.  If it was so easy the big queen producers would have been selling them 20 years ago.

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