San Luis Obispo County was long thought to be the northern limit of AHB in California due to some sort of poorly defined climatic constraint.    In my decades-long paired apiaries experiment,  I matched various prescriptions for keeping TF bees with a best-practices treated yard.    

For a period, when "feral survivor" bees were the latest rage in the TF prescription promoted by partisans,  I collected many feral foundress swarms from as deep in the wilderness as possible.   Some of these bees match AHB by FABIS winglength measure.    

These putative feral AHB mited out and died just as rapidly as any other  "survivor bee"  --- and had orders of magnitude lower health than treated bees.     They did, however swarm at the drop of a hat,  reoccupied vacant colonies, and in the September-October dearth  aggressively usurp other colonies.   The AHB bees tended to maintain several queens simultaneously -- sort of permanent pre-swarming.

My observational data (queens were color coded)  supports the contention that what is called "survivor" fitness in the So Cal AHB is nothing more than really prolific and  aggressive colonization.   They die of mites, but breed like rabbits.    

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