Honeybees can be very gentle. Talking to Joe Latshaw of the Ohio Queen Breeders (http://www.ohioqueenbreeders.com/), the genes for aggression/ gentleness can be selected for and are accumulative. Ie. by selective breeding you can breed gentler, and gentler bees. Cross a gentle bee with a aggressive bee and the result is one that falls about halfway in the middle. According to Latshaw, aggressiveness is not linked in any way to honey production (unless you consider robbing tendencies of aggressive bees, but that's just hurting your other hives), and thus can be selected for independently. Latshaw selects queens for gentleness, brood production (which leads to honey production), mite resistance/suppression and overwintering. Their numbers I saw this spring were very impressive. And they work bees without equipment and destroy hives that have any propensity to stinging humans (though they have noted no significant difference in the response to pests, skunks and the like). I would love to try one of these queens as they sound like a joy to work with, but they are a bit out of my price range as he only produces artificially inseminated breeder queens at 500 each. I hope though to try some open mated queens raised by other breeders from his stock. -Tim