The idea that one behavior in a honey bee colony may correlate to another often comes up. Is brood production correlated to honey production? Is aggressive behavior? Does hygienic behavior directly correlate to the avoidance of colony collapse due to mites? None of these can be answered easily. Here below we see the observation that Italian colonies are less aggressive and better honey producers than indigenous bees of Israel. 

> The introduction of Italian bees into the apiaries in Israel was started in 1948 with the objective of substituting the local population of Syrian bees by a gentler and more productive race. After ten years of importation of Italian queens from the U.S., an increase of about 30% in the average honey production had been achieved. 

> Observations have shown that over a period of 13 consecutive years, even on a within-year basis, the correlation between fertility of  the queen and the yield of her colony was only moderate. The discrepancy between these results and those obtained in other studies and in our preliminary study seems to be due to the interaction between the number of brood cells and environmental factors on honey production, E.G. : in a good year strong colonies will take full advantage of their numerical superiority, but in a bad season they will consume a considerable part of the collected crop and will be prone to swarming, while colonies of medium strength will consume less and will store more honey.   

BAR-COHEN, R., ALPERN, G., & BAR-ANAN, R. (1978). PROGENY TESTING AND SELECTING ITALIAN QUEENS FOR BROOD AREA AND HONEY PRODUCTION. Apidologie, 9(2), 95-100.

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