The reference to lack of economic incentive for breeding programs may have
alluded more to efforts at developing stocks with improved general beekeeping
attributes. Australia has had one or two government/beekeeper programs of that
sort. Simultaneous improvement in multiple traits like honey production, low
swarming, perhaps better overwintering is likely to be slow, similar to the
pace of improvement in cultivated plants and farm vertebrates for pounds per
acre or pounds per animal. The bee colony may already be functioning at
maximal capacity in terms of dealing with the realities of foraging (the
physics of flight, optimal foraging strategies, communication of discovered
resources), the physiology of nutrition (optimizing brood production from
gathered pollen blends, storing resources efficiently), and the thermodynamics
of burning through honey in cold conditions with minimal heat loss.  

  

Note that all or at least most documented examples of "selection" in honey
bees involve behavior of workers. Rather than a slow and tedious march towards
changing some fairly fixed parameter that modifies physiology, immunity,
communication, the breeding efforts have relied on discovering individual rare
colonies (sometimes assisted by single drone inseminations) and fixing the
unique trait(s) in a larger group of progeny colonies. Quite a long list fits
this approach: high alfalfa visitation, reduced defensive behavior, hygiene
towards AFB, high pollen collection, self-grooming of tracheal mites, and more
recently of varroa mites, hygiene towards varroa infested brood (VSH).  

  

Some of the above traits likely already have an optimal balance in colonies
encountering average conditions. Modifying the traits is only useful for
specific novel situations, and may have some costs from excessive expression
of the trait. The high pollen hoarding line in the later generations of
selection needed assistance in getting out of a pollen bound state in the
spring. Some early selections for VSH had colonies with most of the sealed
brood uncapped, varroa infested or not. Extremely low defensive behavior may
make colonies vulnerable to invertebrate and vertebrate predation. Bee
breeders are fortunate in that some of these tradeoffs can be switched to a
desired optimum fairly quickly. But again, this won't happen magically in the
current North American honey bee panmixis.  


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