> The accusation that Moab UT ferals are "pretty much" Africanized

That was in no way an "accusation." (a charge or claim that someone has done something illegal or wrong). Who was being accused, and of what?

On the other hand, I think people are missing an essential point. We are dealing with hybrid colonies. A hybrid colony of bees can consist of a queen with European lineage, which mates with drones of various lineages. The resulting colonies contain workers who may have European, African, or mixed fathers. 

Therefore, the workers of said colonies may have traits of all of these. They may be capable of overwintering, due to the presence of large numbers of European workers, who form the winter cluster. Within this cluster may be thousands of African type workers, who benefit from the cluster. 

When it comes to defensive behavior, this may depend on the number of Africanized workers present as well. Further, when the queen is superseded, the eggs selected for that purpose may have predominantly African genes and produce true to type African colonies. 

That particular colony may not survive winter, but it may produce tens of thousands of drones who impregnate queens which form colonies which could survive it they had sufficient numbers of workers with wintering traits, and so on. It is not a simple matter of "is it African" or is it not. 

> David De Jong has said multiple times that the higher the elevation, the less defensive AHB become.

This is a grand biological experiment here and what Dave de Jong says about bees in Brazil may or may not have anything to do with it. What is in question here is not defensiveness, but how the genetic combinations are made and what effect they have on the final makeup of the colonies, and beyond that, the populations. 

Again, I am not "accusing" anyone of being any thing. What I am pointing out is that if bees are surviving without treatment in California, Arizona, and Texas, they are presumed to be at least part, if not 100% Africanized, because that is the predominant feral type in those states. 

I am quite certain they do not stop at the Utah border, and I do not personally know where the boundary is where pure Africans cannot survive. I don't think anyone does and it certainly will fluctuate according to seasonal as well as climate changes. Then, you have a hybridization zone which may or may not include the entire country since bees with African influence are shipped all over the US. 

The question is: how can you tell? If the DNA test is not reliable, and some Africanized colonies are perfectly manageable, you have a real conundrum. The traits may not manifest themselves immediately, but when they do -- I think you will know. Meanwhile, if it is true that the bees are varroa resistant, they will survive and multiply. 

* * *

Africanized honey bee is a New World hybrid of A. m. scutellata from Africa and European
subspecies, with the African component making up 50-90% of the genome.

Morphometric measures are unable, however, to detect low to medium levels
of Africanization, with 43% of hybrid samples being misidentified as European.

Mitochondrial DNA sequencing is also seen as an unreliable test for
Africanization. Mitochondria are maternally inherited without recombination.

Currently there is no reliable low-cost genetic test for detecting Africanized honey bees (2015)

Chapman, N. C., Harpur, B. A., Lim, J., Rinderer, T. E., Allsopp, M. H., Zayed, A., & Oldroyd, B. P. (2015). A SNP test to identify Africanized honeybees via proportion of ‘African’ancestry. Molecular ecology resources.

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