We basically provide a home for our bees, reduce the number of varroa they have to contend with then take away their food a couple of times a year and exchange it for syrup in the Autumn and try to prevent them from reproducing in the spring and summer. In all other respects the bees live as wild animals, living in the local environment, taking advantage of the opportunities it provides and being subject to the threats.
If my understanding is correct, before widespread management of colonies, left in that environment,natural selection will decide the best genetics to suit. In our country that was AMM and those genes still make up a significant part of the average feral colony genetics.
We have imported so many different bees over the years that the gene pool has been expanded to the extent that any useful genetics from any bee, may be passed on to the local hybrid mongrels. However you can't expect that all the genes of a queen bred in Greece, Slovenia, Germany etc will have a full set of useful genes for the UK.
We do not know better than nature itself and if we stopped or vastly reduced imports of various non-native races, eventually we would have a bee well suited to its environment. Meanwhile we can select for the desirable traits from those locally adapted mongrels and develop a bee with good traits that is well suited to its evnvironment. I think this means that it produces a good amount of honey in an average year but a reasonable amount in a poor year, is not too aggressive, easy to handle and survives the winter with minimal stores. It slows or stops brood rearing when forage is short and may also show some VSH traits eventually.
This would take a while to do but could be worth it. If there are any genes in your buckfast, carnica or ligustica queens that are of use to our british adapted mongrel bees, those genes would survive. Anything unsuitable will either die naturally or be culled by the beekeeper.
It doesn't seem stupid to me to try and look at it from the bees point of view for once.
