> If you try and breed good queens, it may well end in gallant failure, but if you don't try, you will almost certainly end up with something you don't want, especially with regard to aggression or hybridization with other sub species.

Hmm. This all depends upon "what you want". If you want a bee that takes care of itself, is not dependent on humans, a low maintenance bee, then maybe the best plan is to not breed bees, not intervene on their behalf, not maintain them in the usual sense. 

This is what Dave deJong and Mike Allsopp have been suggesting for many years. That the whole enterprise of breeding honey bees to suit our needs is flawed and that the most vigorous bees are produced in the wild by natural selection. Selective breeding and natural selection are in no way the same thing. 

Humans try to manipulate organisms into being more like what they want, or at least they select the ones that they prefer over the ones that they don't. Nature simply kills off the failures, leaving the ones that have managed to attain, obtain, or develop coping skills that gives them the edge.

The problem is: natural selection appears to require a population size of a critical mass, a certain amount of time, and usually some sort of severe challenge -- like disease or predation. In a benevolent world, all creatures would survive and there would not be an increase in fitness. (Sort of like human society has become).

Maybe the next step is honeybee preserves where populations can develop independently from human manipulation.

PLB

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