@mediocrerenaissancememe I took a beekeeping class last year and got to work with bees a bunch so here's my corrections/comments
first off, honey bees are not an endangered species. beekeeping is a very precarious business right now, and there are very few "wild"/feral honeybees at least in their introduced range, but this is not the same thing as being in danger of extinction.
clipping queens wings was actually not recommended by my textbook because sometimes if the workers feel that something is wrong with the queen, they will kill her, and it's not all that effective at preventing swarming. If you want to prevent the queen from leaving you can basically put a little door in the hive that is just big enough for the workers to leave but not the queen because she's bigger.
swarming is how honeybee colonies reproduce in nature. they make a new queen, the queen leaves with a bunch of the bees and honey, and the hive continues. this is their natural reproductive behavior, but beekeepers usually multiply hives by allowing the bees to raise new queens, removing the new queens, and placing them in new hives created by splitting up large hives. thus swarming is not necessary for them to reproduce.
When ALL the bees leave, that's called absconding and bees do it when they are not happy with the conditions of their hive. This can be because of parasite infestation, strong chemical smell, basically anything the bees don't like
african and european honeybees are the same species, but african honeybees are more aggressive. bees that have interbred between the two sub-species are called "africanized" bees or more commonly, "killer" bees. Basically, africanized bees are more vigorous in defending their hives to the point that they can literally kill people and livestock because they sting so many times. i don't have to explain why this is bad. however, they are better adapted to tropical environments so some keepers in central and latin america have learned safety precautions to work with them.
Artificial insemination of queens isn't very common, but nowadays a lot of researchers are trying to more intentionally breed bees with certain traits like disease resistance, and artificial insemination is the only way to do this because you otherwise can't control what drones the queen mates with. Yes, collecting the semen kills the drone, but only because drones naturally die during mating.
culling queens happens sometimes but it's important to note that a natural part of the queen's life is killing other queens in their cells or fighting them to the death once she emerges.
Low-performing hives are merged with more successful hives, not culled. Annual hive losses are up to 50%, but beekeepers obviously don't want this to happen.
The main source of profit for beekeepers actually isn't honey, it's pollination services. This is probably the main ethical problem with beekeeping as bees are trucked very long distances to pollinate industrial monocultures of crops like almonds, and in the process they are exposed to pesticides and diseases. it's very brutal on the bees and the pesticide filled industrial agriculture is obviously very bad for the ecosystem.
honey bees aren't native to areas outside europe, africa and asia, but since there are many crops from europe, africa and asia (such as almonds) that depend entirely on honeybees for pollination, they're not going anywhere unless we stop growing those crops.
I think the evidence is still unclear on whether honey bees negatively impact native bees in any way, but there isn't sufficient evidence to call them an invasive species
most of this comes from The Beekeeper's Handbook by Diana Sammataro and Alphonse Avitabile