Genetic variability does not per se confirm adaptive movement.  It is simply the raw material that permits the possibility of speciation.  Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium illustrates that in the absence of adaptive impulse, variable alelles will remain mixed in a population.

Practically, non-agriculturally, evolution primarily happens on the fringes -- where isolation permits a genotype to fix (and most to expire).  The alleles are like roulette - on some remote island, the number "23" comes up, and suddenly the bug "23" has been born into the world.

Unbounded, evolution happens glacially, measured by the clocklike ticks of the mitochondriaDNA. 

In the vast hybrid swarm of North America, every roulette number, red and black, is present in unordered profusion: but because the queen bets on 30 numbers every time, nothing changes.  The queen and the competitors next door have the alleles for every single number, but they never make an exclusive bet.

Let me reprint a very instructive story of Randy's and permit me to add my own coda.
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However, two years ago, I ordered an instrumentally inseminated Minnesota Hygienic x VSH queen from Tom Glenn (www.glenn-apiaries.com); she is the best queen I’ve seen since before varroa! I call her my “Dream Queen.” This particular cross of the individual parents was a magical combination. She’s been going two and a half years with absolutely no treatment, in a survival yard with colonies collapsing around her, and has negligible mite levels. Her open-mated daughters were the healthiest, strongest, best honey producers I’ve seen, and outperformed all other stocks stuck late in the mud at the end of last year’s rain-drenched almond pollination season. The Dream Queen colonies came out fat and happy, while everyone else starved. Needless to say, I’ve grafted a lot of daughters off her! Bee stock like this is the future of our industry; if all my colonies performed like hers, it would be like beekeeping in “The Good Old Days” before varroa again!

My “Dream Queen”–perhaps the best queen that I’ve ever had. She was a Minnesota hygienic x VSH cross from Tom Glenn, and lasted nearly three full years (finally was superseded after I wrote this article). Mite levels remained negligible without treatment, yet the colony (and her daughter colonies) were by far the most productive in my entire operation. The experience of having a colony like this shows me that breeding is the key to future successful beekeeping!
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The tragedy of the "Dream Queen" is she is not the "foundress" of a line of perfect bees.  Her miraculous combination of genetics and those of her progeny were doomed to revert back into the general morass of the background "mutts".   The bee's have selected a radically leveling genetic system. For all the "metaphor" about royalty in beekeeping, in genetics they are radical egalitarians -- the queen sleeps with every Tom, Dick and Harry and her children are run-of-the-mill.  The drones have no fathers, only grandfathers.    

I argue that the "normative impulse" or "sleeping with Tom, Dick and Harry" are central to Bee ecology.  They are resisting speciation, refusing to change, able to interbreed from South Africa to Finland.  This makes the human effort to domesticate traits conducive to management (and jet-setting parasites) especially difficult -- the bees have a global anti-speciation strategy.

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