The hue bulbs are complicated, to put it mildly.
Philips follows the ZigBee LL standard, but they don't have ZigBee HA fallback like the other bulb vendors.
As such, if you buy a single hue bulb, yes, it can be paired with the Almond+, but if it for some reason would lose network connection, there's no way to reset the bulbs without a hue hub and by then, you can only connect them to the hue hub.
Hopefully ZigBee 3.0 will fix all of those stupid issues.