I refer back to the earlier comment that all most beekeepers can do is select from their best.

By and large, in the PacNW we are spared the incursions of the Africanized bees (aside from the occasional treatment free type who deliberately sets out to souce and install them)...but annual washes of industrially raised bees, ie. Hawaiian, New Zealand (esp. north of the border), drones from package started colonies, and the drones off mobile pollination colonies make it impossible to create "locally adapted" bees. You might, as others have pointed out, have half a chance if you have a geographically isolated apiary and buckets of time. Because DCA's and the slow turnover of honey bee generations both work against any effort to fix any trait.

Queen quality is such a huge function of larval nutrition:I believe the old saw that a well fed during development queen from an unspectacular gene pool will outperform a poorly fed during development genetic star.

The other missing piece is drone quality and quantity. Queens keep track of how many matings they have had on their mating flights, but not the quality of the semen they receive (Koeniger and Koeniger)...and very little attention is devoted to superior drone production. Time to change that!

Because package queens on both sides of the USA/Canada border (which our club straddles) appear to be superceded at a rate of 60% in their first season (tough on new beekeepers who often fail to identify supercedure in progress till they are hopelessly queenless), we advise all our new beekeepers to home raise lavishly fed replacement queens ASAP for their package starts. We are also asking all club members to drop the IPM strategy of drone sacrifice for Varroa control, controlling Varroa by other means and deliberately raising an extra frame of drones in their best performing colonies. That way, we hope to provide lots of high quality, high fertility drones in our local DCA's.

Given adequate forage (admittedly an increasingly rare commodity), bees are remarkably good at making baby bees and honey....anywhere they are plonked. **The rest is really up to the beekeeper**: decent housing, swarm management, varroa control, dealing promptly with foulbrood/disease, trying to minimize agri-spray exposure, addressing temperature stress during shipping, providing optimal conditions to create new queens and new drones. Here in the chilly north, good winter prep and protection (wrapping, feeding) ensures the colonies get through a long winter in good shape...good enough to capitalize on our short summers and finicky nectar flows.

In short, you get more mileage out of a "locally adapted" beekeeper than a search for locally adapted bees. 

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