Hi Bob

My scutellata breeder queens derive from a seven year old closed
breeding population. The model follows (Robert) Page (I'm sure it's
the same Page you refer to). More than 20 generations (depending on
the yardstick) are involved. The five breeder queens' bees exhibit, as
you would expect, varying degrees of defensiveness. The most gentle
bees are very gentle indeed - if you work them with care, you would not
even need a smoker. The most defensive do not "attack" like wild
bees, but they certainly try to intimidate you by buzzing around your
head in large numbers. The latter bees have the irritating habit of
having, literally, half a dozen extremely alert police bees that patrol the
hive area. The breeder queen hives are kept deliberately in the
medium population level, in order to not place the queens under
undue pressure.

My largest populations are contained in double brood chambers, used
for building queen cells. These are headed by open-mated pedigree
daughter queens, in the bottom brood chamber. To enhance the
quality of queen cells, sealed brood from donor hives is added to the
top brood chambers. These double story hives are very populous. I
have a number of them about 100m from my front door, across a field.
These bees get irritated, but not angry, when you work them. After I
work these bees, I rarely have any follow me more than 50m. They
settle down very quickly. I know from painful experience that if you
disturbed a wild scutellata nest with that kind of population, the bees
would be stinging, never mind following, for hundreds of metres in
every direction.  Also, the bees from the cell builders almost
immediately "lose memory" that they have been disturbed. Wild
scutellata often remain very aggressive ("crazy") for at least a day after
a disturbance.

I would conclude - based on experience rather than science - that the
pedigreed scutellata are a lot more gentle than the wild ones. But I
would suggest that no matter how gentle a scutellata may become, it
would never equate the exact nature of gentleness you find, for
example, in the Italians.

Barry in Kyalami