"that this is accomplished in part via outbreeding and polyandry, "

Out breeding and polyandry are forced onto honey bees because of their sex determination genetics.  The last I heard there were some 18 alleles at the sex determination locus.  If you assume that those 18 alleles are all pretty much equal in population concentration then the average queen is still going to lay about 5% diploid drone eggs even if she mated with hundreds of males.  If she only mated with five males she could lay 20% diploid drones.  That is such a high number I would think it would take a toll on colony vigor.  If nothing else it reduces the number of brood a queen can produce per day by 20%.  It would also be noticed due to shotgun brood.  I doubt if selection for laying more eggs per day is a solution as it would take more bees to cover the larger brood area, leaving less bees to forage.  Of course she could also lay 0% diploid drones.  Propagation of genes is going to have naturally selected against the queens that only mated with five
 males long before man started trying to control honey bee genetics.  That historical selection would have pushed hard for some number of matings over at least ten I would think.

None the less, you obviously can select for performance.  My ABC has a table showing the honey production of a yard of 30 or 40 colonies where poor performers were requeened with queens from good performers for several years.  Overall colony average production went up substantially over a period of years.  With that many colonies you stand some chance of flooding the local area with your good genes, even if you have a decent population of ferals.  You are not going to flood 100% but do not need to either.  I would hope our queen breeders would select for production, gentleness and other desirable traits.  But, we also have conflicting desires on what the ideal bee should do.  The migratory guys are not going to want a queen that needs a stack of boxes six feet tall or they swarm uncontrollably.  Yet such a queen is ideal for the non migratory guy if he is in a decent honey producing area.

It seems to me we have some unsolvable genetic conflicts on the ideal bee.  One bee is not good for everyone.  At least one breeder has recognized this conflict.  Latshaw raises breeder queens aimed at the migratory guy and other queens aimed at the stationary guy according to what he says on his web site.  The migratory guys are the big market so are going to get the most attention from the breeder queen guys.  Near as I can tell mites are a manageable problem for the migratory guys.  They are also manageable for the stationary guys if they bother to manage them.  Most do not bother and would rather blame the problem on pesticides based on what I see local guys doing.

Dick
" Any discovery made by the human mind can be explained in its essentials to the curious learner."  Professor Benjamin Schumacher talking about teaching quantum mechanics to non scientists.   "For every complex problem there is a solution which is simple, neat and wrong."  H. L. Mencken

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