"our effort to maintain desirable species, which is often difficult"

The effort in Germany was not to maintain a desirable species but rather to maintain a desirable cultivar.  Yes, splitters may give different cultivars of bees sub species names but personally I think all honey bees are one species as there is no sexual isolation whatsoever between them.  In general the difficulty in maintaining a desirable cultivar relates pretty much 100% to its modes of sexual reproduction and the incidence of undesired cultivars in the wild.  For example I raise four different cultivars of tomatoes for my wife each year.  I raise them in pots in a greenhouse side by side.  Literally the vines are often intertwined.  Yet seeds from any one of the four faithfully reproduce the parents.  I have maintained a couple of these cultivars now for 20 years and have yet to see a single example of a cross.  The reason is simple.  Tomatoes self pollinate so close to 100% that a cross is rare.  Or, another example would be farmers have zero problems maintaining pure breeds of cattle or hogs because it is easy enough to insure where the sperm came from.  Or how about the highly inbred mice and rats used in lab testing?  There is no problem maintaining pure cultivars.

This is not at all true of your bee example as drones fly for miles and can not be fenced.  In fact to use bees as an example of how hard it is to maintain pure cultivars is close to meaningless as their mode of reproduction is so unusual.

Dick

HL Mencken said: "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed — and hence clamorous to be led to safety — by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. "

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