"So, is aggressiveness a regressive trait in all honeybees? In other words,
do easily manipulated hives go bad after only three swarms, which might not
be three years but less or more than that?"

I am going to give a general non answer based on genetics.  Very little in genetics is simply one gene.  Pick about any phenotype you want to talk about and do a good analysis and you will find all kinds of places in the DNA correlate with that trait.  A recent publication on intelligence in humans showed intelligence was linked to some 50 different loci in the DNA and also that the sum of all those loci still was a miserable predictor of intelligence.  Likewise height in humans is linked to some 70 different loci.  In general complex behavior things like bee aggression would be expected to be influenced by several different genes.  Some might be dominant, some recessive and some even totally silent unless some other specific mutant is also present and homozygous.  You would be really surprised at how often that silent gene happens.

The idea that a lot of things are just due to one mutant trait traces clear back to Mendel's peas.  It turns out he was super lucky and happened to pick out a few traits that are mainly influenced by single mutants.  This whole idea was fostered in genetics teaching until fairly recently.  When I was a kid taking genetics I learned of a number of human traits that were single gene issues according to the text and teacher.  Things like attached ear lobes versus unattached.  Or a widows peak on your hair line over your forehead versus no peak.  Well, that was 60 years ago and genetics has moved forward.  Today we know neither of those things is due to a single gene.  Some of the examples I learned are not even for sure due to genetics according to current thinking.

In the 90s when the human genome project was underway one justification was once we knew the whole human genome it was going to give us a great handle to use to tackle all kinds of disease issues.  Things like cancer and heart disease.  Well, almost 20 years after the human genome was published what did we learn that helped solve major disease issues?  Close to nothing other than those diseases are in general the result of so many different genes interacting we are still learning where to start looking.

For whatever it is worth, I have had swarm crazy bees.  Feral stock that you could not keep out of the trees long enough to make any honey crop at all.  I routinely worked them with bare arms and no gloves just like I work my current stock.  They were probably a tiny bit more aggressive than what I have now.  But, no evidence that swarming was linked to aggression.  I have worked Italians with a commercial queen that were much worse.  Not bad enough to make me put on gloves, but bad enough I did not like the experience of working them.

Most every animal I have ever worked with had anecdotal myths about inheritance of some traits.  In bees a popular one today is that drones influence aggression much more than queens.  That sort of stuff generally has a small grain of truth and a lot of simply folk lore based on no solid data.  If you dig into the genetic details the folk lore is generally wrong as a general statement, but true under some very special circumstance.

Dick

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