Hi all
You often hear about "natural beekeeping" and how management causes all sorts of problems and if you just leave the bees alone they do fine. Recent work by Dave Tarpy and friends compares feral and managed hives and finds no difference in their immune response. 

They also compared urban vs rural hives and again noticed no significant difference. Overall there were large differences in the hives but they did not correlate with any of these factors, suggesting that hives do well or poorly regardless of where they are or if they are managed or not.

> We sampled foragers from feral and managed colonies in rural, suburban, and urban landscapes in and around Raleigh, NC, USA. We then analyzed adult workers using two standard bioassays for insect immune function. We found that there was far more variation within colonies for encapsulation response or phenoloxidase activity than among rural to urban landscapes, and we did not observe any significant difference in immune response between feral and managed bees. These findings suggest that social pollinators, like honey bees, may be sufficiently robust or variable in their immune responses to obscure any subtle effects of urbanization.

> Although other research suggests that urbanization and management can affect honey bee pathogen load and diversity, our results do not indicate that urbanization negatively affects the immunocompetence of honey bees as measured by these standard bioassays. Importantly, we also found no evidence that there are differences in immunocompetence between managed and feral bees.

Appler, R. Holden, Steven D. Frank, and David R. Tarpy. "Within-Colony Variation in the Immunocompetency of Managed and Feral Honey Bees (Apis mellifera L.) in Different Urban Landscapes." Insects 6.4 (2015): 912-925.

Post Script

This study comes  to different conclusions than Tom Seeley's which found differences between isolated colonies and those in crowded apiaries. It appears that crowding of hives creates a different dynamic. Presumably, he is working with apiaries not exceeding several dozen hives, which would seem small by commercial beekeeping standards. Large scale operators  often place hundreds of hives in proximity, much the same as other livestock producers. No doubt this has serious side effects. 

PLB

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