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Please share any insights into sourcing bees (packages or swarms). What are the best times of year to start looking? What indicates a good supplier? How can you get hold of a swarm?

As the theme of this community is to use more natural methods for working with bees, these are my recommendations.
Do not waste your money on packages; these 3lb bundles of bees are from a random amount of hives, with no direct genetic relationship, and send with a queen who is not related. - The result, a mismatched set of bees that a lot of beekeepers have issues with.
A locally sourced Nuc thats adapted to your climate would be best.

I always trust Tim Brood at Highland Honeybees in Boulder - if you keep bees in the Denver Area. His operation is small, and his bees overwinter here on the front range. I respect his practices and his queens produce great colonies.

I source my bees from Olivarez bee farms in California, but have had varied success over the years. I would love a system that would allow you to mail a bee to a lab and get results on specific genetic information and add that to the dataset. I imagine a colony that does really well in Arizona won't do as well if it were kept at a really high elevation in Washington. It doesn't seem like there's great information along those lines anywhere though. I had no idea that the packages come from random hives. I know they let you know what kind of queen you have. I don't know that there really is a whole lot of genetic variability in commercial bees which might add to the reasons why ccd is so pernicious.

@keitharaneo, as insects with rapid generation turnovers, honey bees adapt to their environments very quickly. With that said, it is still ideal to work with bees who have already over wintered successfully wherever you live. This is why many beekeepers prefer to catch swarms instead of purchasing packages. If a colony is strong enough to swarm in the early spring it usually means they have over wintered successfully within local conditions. Yet, swarms are always a mixed bag, you never know what pathogens they could be carrying, their temperament, and it is common to hive a swarm missing it's queen. For these reasons it is conversely discouraged to catch swarms in areas of the US that have Africanized bees, (topic for another time) and why many beekeepers still rely on commercial packages. While the original bees in a package may be from random hives, the queen's genetic material will dominate the hive before too long as she replaces the older bees with new generations- it is her genetic makeup, and perhaps origin, that is important when purchasing a package.
In my opinion, the best way to find strong local bees is to reach out to beekeepers in your community, and create networks that support healthy bee populations close to home. Thanks for the dialogue!

We like Beekind in Sebastopol; they have Italians, Carniolans, and their own local stock which has been bred untreated for years on the California coast. If you're in the Bay Area and need bees, the time to get an order in is right now.

http://beekind.com/orderbees.html

The advice I'm getting in PGH is to go with nucs as early in the spring as possible but be ready to re-queen from local hives if they have trouble adjusting to the winters. There are occasionally local nucs, but they happen throughout the year and not just in early spring.