A furious debate has broken out among beekeepers over imported bee semen.
Northland bee breeder David Yanke has finally won approval to import honey bee semen from Germany.
His plan is to cultivate a breed with a higher tolerance for the killer varroa mite.
But National Beekeepers Association presidentJane Lorimer said the bees had a potentially dangerous downside.
"The carniolan stock tends to be a breed very prone to swarming," she said. "While our bees do swarm, we try to minimise it, and the carniolan breed is worse than the Italian breed we have here."
Passions run high in the beekeeping industry, already split over how to manage the destructive varroa mite, which was discovered in the North Island three years ago.
Plans to keep the South Island free of the mite have proved so contentious that Biosecurity Minister Jim Sutton has ordered a ministerial inquiry.
The varroa programme co-ordinator for the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, Paul Bolger, an experienced beekeeper, said it was "entirely possible" carniolans would swarm.
"The general industry belief is they will behave differently from what we have now, but that's a management issue irrespective of the strain of bee," he said.
The carnolian bee was adapted to cold climates and produced a honey crop over a shorter timeframe as it prepared for a longer and harsher winter.
That meant populations grew more quickly than New Zealand's Italian-derived honey bee, which could prompt the bees to swarm to a new home.
Mr Yanke, an American who has lived in New Zealand for 23 years, has been fighting for 10 years to finalise his bee semen plans.
He says the New Zealand beekeeping industry sometimes has a fortress mentality.
"I guess there's a lot of fear of the unknown but this bee has gone everywhere else in the world. It's just like importing a new breed of cattle."
Mr Yanke will bring semen from around 1000 drones to New Zealand from Germany in June.
The collection of bee semen is bad news for the male drones. The process of extracting it, using a microscopic glass tube, kills the male, although drones die when mating naturally with the queen bee.
The queen bee is given a "whiff of carbon dioxide" to put her to sleep, then put into a glass tube and inseminated.
