An analysis of honey bee colony density throughout Europe, Africa and western Asia concludes that:

> As disease dissemination and land use continue to threaten European honeybees (Brown & Paxton 2009), only populations managed by beekeepers are likely to survive. Although we cannot discount apiculture itself as involved in the decline of wild European honeybees, our data suggest that without beekeeping, honeybees in Europe would be close to extinction.

>  Because honeybees are “rescue pollinators” and thus able to compensate for the decline of native pollinators in degraded habitats (Aizen & Feinsinger 1994; Dick 2001), we suggest that promoting beekeeping activities could compensate for habitat loss and ensure adequate pollination of wild plants and crops. In the light of severe declines in beekeeping activities in various European countries (COLOSS 2009), we recommend that beekeeping with local subspecies should be encouraged to preserve native genetic diversity and to reduce the transmission of pathogens throughout the continent (De la Rúa et al. 2009). A first step toward this could be to reconsider the conservation status of honeybees in Europe and to regard beekeeping not only as a profitable business for producing honey, but also as an essential component of biodiversity conservation.

Naturally, a persuasive case cannot be made on this basis for the conservation of honey bees in the Americas. Beekeepers will have to refer to the need for pollination as the chief justification for maintaining an active beekeeping community in the US, etc. Another study casts doubt on whether feral colonies would ever be adequate for pollination:

> We suggest that without supplementation with domestic colonies, it is unlikely that any crops requiring insect pollination are adequately pollinated. Second, concerns about the impacts of feral honey bee colonies on natural ecosystems (Goulson 2003) are likely to be unfounded in most areas because the density of feral colonies is quite low.   Typical recommended stocking rates are 100–200 colonies/km2 (e.g. Free 1970), whereas our estimates are <10 colonies/km2.  

This latter study was done in Australia where feral colonies thrive but do not reach the recommended densities for crop pollination. The first study lists only a small region in South Africa as having densities >10 colonies/km2. Additionally, they state that:

> the European honeybee populations we studied here were mainly composed of managed bees.

Sources:

Jaffé (2010) Estimating the Density of Honeybee Colonies across Their Natural Range to Fill the Gap in Pollinator Decline Censuses

Arundel (2014) Remarkable uniformity in the densities of feral honey bee Apis mellifera Linnaeus, 1758 (Hymenoptera: Apidae) colonies in South Eastern Australia

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