Honeybee races - nature or nurture?

[SDM]

I always understood it as bees not being limited by their genetics at least not in what they display.
But surely the result is the same if we keep selecting tendencies.
A trait that is never displayed may as well not be there.
I'm probably over simplifying it, but if traits can be fixed, how do they change ?
Or do you mean that at some stage in the future a geneticist could switch them back on ? That would take us back to the species needing human intervention to survive.
I've got some more reading to do I think.