.>> In my view, feral bees are no better nor worse than the bees you can buy. 

I agree probably because the true  ferals have been pushed to near extinction by the package bee industry just as the wild salmons have been replaced by hatchery fish:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdNJ0JAwT7I&t=3883s
 
But when we leave the wild fish alone and clean up the river, the wild variety bounces right back (42:46):

Hatcheries are like package bee producers in many ways as the package bees do not experience the same stressors from the environment like the feral ones, a reason the hatchling cannot survive left alone in nature, resembling the kept and medicated bees that cannot survive out in nature by themselves.  Yet each year we pump out more and more package bees into the world as more and more kept bees fail to survive.

The true ferals have no chance, for we refuse to give them "a clean river," so to speak.  Whenever we humans industrialize any living organism, there are problems, usually after some initial success.

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