It has been often cited how a mite-resistant stock fails once it is incorporated into a commercial beekeeping operation, emphasizing the importance of location, location, and location, a point well-proven by researchers:

"The movement of honey bees could lead to the spread of negative traits from the introduced population to the resident managed population and vice versa. For example, introduced AHBs express heightened defensive behavior, absconding tendencies, etc. and these can be incorporated, via hybridization, into the managed honey bee population in areas where AHBs spread (Caron, 2001; Schneider et al., 2004).

Bee movement can impact heritable traits in other ways as well. A selected stock that exhibits beneficial traits can lose those traits when moved into a new area. This occurs because of open mating, i.e., newly produced queens leaving their hives to mate with multiple drones from different colonies among the local population (Koeniger et al., 2014). As an example, selected breeding stock could lose some of its desirable traits, e.g., gentleness and resistance to V. destructor, when moved into an area with established honey bee colonies. This may occur even when the original intent of the proposed move was to introduce selected traits into resident managed populations.

Honey bees (resident or introduced) may lose or lack adaptations that improve their health, productivity, and survival in a specific area. Multiple research teams have demonstrated that honey bees in a selection program can fail to perform as expected when moved to a different environment with different climatic conditions (Costa et al., 2012; Hatjina et al., 2014; Kovaèiæ et al., 2020). For example, a pan-European evaluation on behavioral traits across 16 genotypes of five honey bee subspecies in various environmental conditions across Europe showed that genotype and location can impact traits such as defensiveness and swarming behavior (Uzunov et al., 2014). The widespread movement of a large percentage of the managed honey bee population in the United States may limit the development of locally adapted honey bee stocks."

There appears to be just too many dynamic and powerful variables, such as flora and fauna, bee pathogens, chemical sprays, climate, bee management, and disappearing idle lands, etc.  to name only a few, all of which throw off the expectations of the beekeeper.  Conclusion?  Keep them where it works and let them bee!

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