Dave, I have had two years of buying Carniolan packages from Australia, they are beautiful, very gentle, great with orientation so they do not have a propensity for robbing. I have heard the Italians are famous for robbing (but I really don't know, it is only what I have read). My girls are so gentle, they hardly even bother when I am in the hive in the summer, I venture I could even go out and work them without smoke, but I don't, I see no need to provoke them. I caught a swarm in my first summer of beekeeping and I have no idea what kind they were. I just know that they were very prolific, but man, the moment the inner cover was lifted even slightly, you feel the "aura" of this colony, mean, nasty, protective and wanting to sting you come _____ or high water. I let them be for the remainder of the summer and they came through the winter with flying colours. I always was very careful when I went near this hive, so nasty. Last early summer I was going to requeen this colony in the hopes that eventually they would become peaceful. Hmmm...one day an enormous swarm emerged from this hive and I wasn't around at the beginning of their procedure, my nephew came and told me about half an hour after it had started. I went out to see what was going on and saw the remains of the cloud flying off into the distance. I followed them for quite a ways, but then they went up so far in one of the cottonwoods, I could see where they went to, but no way on this green earth could have retrieved them. Actually, this bugged me a bit, but then I actually went with the view "good riddence to bad rubbish", it saved me the work of going into this monstrous entity and finding the queen. I had made a nuc a few days before giving them a frame that had some queen cells from one of my Carniolan colonies (they were probaby getting ready to swarm too). I checked this nuc to see if any queens had emerged, none yet, so I cut out a queen cell and was going to attach it to a frame in the swarm colony. I put the queen cell into a little tiny box and put it aside. When I peaked in, the queen had emerged and was walking around the little tiny box. Yikes!!! So I carried this box up to my kitchen and put her in a queen cage and put some marshmallow in the entrance. I didn't have time to make queen candy and I heard that marshmallow worked OK. I then went back to the beeyard and placed the queen cage in with the swarm colony. Well, I guess it worked, the queen was laying eggs (and lots of them) a few weeks later. After some time, there was indeed a difference in the temperament of the bees in this old swarm colony, not a huge difference, but at least I was not intimidated anymore by this colony. I really have to wonder what breed the "swarm" was, maybe a new one called "grumpy".
You have received good advice from people, you need to research and go with gut feeling I guess, everyone has their own breed of bees that they like I guess. As an aside, when I read all about the Carniolan, I was impressed, I did do alot of research on them, so many good things, the only thing bad that I could really see was that they build up so fast in the spring that they have a tendency to swarm. But then, if you only have a few colonies, it is pretty easy to prevent swarming I would think. I did not have any swarm (maybe that is simply luck, I don't know). I am with my bees so much of the time, working outside, I can see them from almost any part of my acreage. I am going to post a picture of a "bee beard" on one of my strong colonies. It was really hot, and they were probably getting pretty full, but I dealt with them by splitting and other things and they never did swarm, just got stronger and stronger.