> Surely as soon as a beekeeper feeds a hive it ceases to be locally adapted and becomes beekeeper adapted.
> What the beekeeper does is to alter the "realized niche" of the bee. 

I think what he is saying is that the beekeeper and his/her methods are part of that niche. The bees are responding not only to the environment per se but to the artificial influences of the management technique including feeding, protection, etc. 

Niche construction is common among species: bees create a microenvironment inside the hive, as well as influencing the floral makeup of their external environment through selectively pollinating species that reward them.

Insofar as the influence of beekeeping activity on the evolution of the bee, I don't think we can make statements about this, really. Too little is known about honey bee genetics to make blanket statements on its evolution.

For example, I often hear that "Europeans created the docile European bee through selection." This hypothesis is impossible to test, since we don't know what bees were like ten thousand years ago, but it is more likely that docile bees already existed and were adopted by people. European bees essentially tolerate us better than say African bees.  

It is interesting to me that current thinking suggests that the dog was domesticated but not the cat. The dog's behavior has been deeply altered as a result of breeding by humans, the thinking goes, but the cat was merely tolerated by early societies, and has not really been domesticated in the same sense. I submit that the honey bee is more like the cat, that it merely tolerates our activities and goes about its business essentially unchanged by us.

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