"But that doesn't mean that it's not useful  to describegeographically-separated breeded populations by their distinct
characteristics."
I do not think anyone has an objection to naming them.  We have how many hundreds of named dogs and lots of named cattle, chickens and hogs just to give a few examples.  But, are those named honey bees subspecies or breeds or is it just a easy way of classifying them?  Therein lies the rub as I do not think you could ever get a group of biologists to agree on definitions that define breed versus subspecies versus race versus whatever terms I have forgotten to include such as variety or cultivar.  It is often impossible to even get biologists to agree if two different living things belong to the same species, much less some finer detail.  Is varroa destructor a new race, a new species or a new whatever?  I know biologists that will argue it is a new species and others who argue that is nuts.  So, it gets down to opinion which can be argued endlessly and no one can ever win the argument.
Even looking alike tells you next to nothing.  There was an article just published on humans who look like identical twins yet share no relationship closer than fourth or sixth cousin perhaps.  Most everyone you meet is that closely related to you so such relationship is pretty meaningless.  Yet the interesting thing is these doppelgangers share far more than simply external phenotypes.  They are closer in many characters such as education, IQ, temperament, job, life styles, etc than expected for random assortment.  Why?  Simple.  Lots of things are linked to facial characteristics and other visible phenotypic traits and get dragged along with looks.  To take an animal example consider racing homer pigeons.  The occasional racing homer has a chest frill.  The cause of a chest frill is a few feathers are rotated in the feather folicle by something like 90 degrees.  If you take such homers and mate them a few of the young will have chest frills.  Keep doing this a few generations and most young will have a chest frill.  So far no surprises.  But, by generation five you will notice the birds have gotten much smaller than the homers you started with.  The stance will also have changed to much more upright.  Some young will start showing up that  have feathered legs.  In short you will have a bird that looks far different from a racing homer.  But, those birds will still come home just fine, although perhaps a bit on the slow side as smaller birds are not as fast as homer sized birds.  How does this happen?  That chest frill is fairly complex genetics.  We really do not know how complex but a good bet would be four or five genes which are pure recessives at least as individuals.  So, when you select for chest frill you are going to drag along lots of stuff that is linked to those chest frill genes and that stuff that has nothing to do with making a chest frill.  I suspect much the same is true of honey bees.  The yellow of Italians is linked to lots of stuff that makes an Italian and ditto dark color with Carnys.  But, I also bet if you carried out a good breeding program you could make nice yellow Italians behave just like Carnys and vice versa.
Dick


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