Joe,
 
surely the aim of breeding should be the gentle, healthy bee that brings a
lot of honey. Sometimes you get those bee breeds. But it is a hard never
ending work to preserve these qualities.
According your questions about standards in bee breeding let me tell you
something about breeding of Carnica bees in Germany. We have these standards
and we have made some good results. But still there are a lot of
difficulties on the way:
 
For example queen breeders have to be trained on classifying and
categorizing bees on these standards. The beekeepers work in different ways
at hives and maybe cause stinging by their individual methods of beekeeping.
According to this and other problems we have official test stands for
queens. Here in Bavaria there are three at different places in the country
and with different yields. The queen breeder has to send queen to each of
those test stands where only one person checks the hives of those queens of
different breeders. After one year (in former times two years) the queen
breeder gets the results. The results are amounts of produced honey,
susceptibility to deseases, characters of the bees and so on. You get a
ranking list.
All queens of that year are tested at competition conditions and the hives
are managed in the same way at the same places and by the same persons.
Perhaps this method is the right way to get better queens and bees.
 
Reimund
_____________________________
Beekeeper in Germany (Bavaria)
Queen Rearing of Carniolan Bees
Insemination Station
_____________________________
 
 
latshaw schrieb:
 
> Are there any standards in the bee industry for breeding
> programs? Who is to say what is productive, disease resistant, gentle
> and in general a pleasant bee to keep?  What beekeepers will tolerate in
> their stock, is what they will have to work with in their program.  What
> should beekeepers have to tolerate?  Do beekeepers realize the full
> potential of their bees?
>         After talking with many private individuals and some bee clubs,
> I find that many beekeepers are simply unaware of what can be
> accomplished in beekeeping,IF stock is mantained and selection pressure
> is common practice in the breeding program.
>         I enjoy working with bees very much, but I do not have to
> tolerate diseased colonies that have a tendency to sting me when I enter
> the yard to perform daily tasks.  I prefer to enter a yard of bees where
> I can work my colonies with minimal smoke, a pair of shorts, maybe a
> shirt if it is a cool day, and a veil sitting on the tailgate of my
> truck.  I also like knowing that I don't have to use medications to keep
> my bees free of minor diseases.  If a disease appears, I simply
> eliminate that queen.  Often times I can find the appearance of the same
> disease somewhere in the queen's family history, so I select against
> such undesirable traits.
>         Beekeeping is meant to be an enjoyable hobby or business.  Bees
> can be productive and pleasant to work at the same time, but beekeepers
> need to be aware of what they should expect from their colonies.
>
> Sincerely,
> Joe Latshaw