Catherine Edwards:
>>There is a group of beeks in my beekeeping association who are heavily into
propagating "local bees", even to the point of scolding people who buy nucs
and packages because the sources are outside the local boundaries they
agreed upon. Their reference point is Dr. Seeley's "Darwinian Beekeeping".>>

Bees are pretty good at exploiting whatever biozone they find themselves in, so it is the beekeeper who is "locally adapted". Hence regional differences in management.

That said, there are two good reasons to buy local bees:

1. you (hopefully) are not buying pests and diseases from outside your area: here we are still Small Hive Beetle free and would like to keep it that way. Ditto for Africanized bees, amitraz resistant bees, and resistant/virulent strains of foulbroods.

2. you support your local bee producers, whose track record you can verify ie. who reliably makes good queens, who is available to help you when you have questions/challenges with your bees.

Just as an aside, it has become common locally to produce "nuc-ages"...overwintered hives split into nucs then queened with imported queens. Drops your imported pest/disease risk, but you lose some of the advantages of true nucs.

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