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Insect Invaders
By John Albright,
Biologist - Public Information Specialist, at Shasta Mosquito and Vector Control District Some people are born to infamy (e.g. Benedict Arnold, Jr. --
if there was such a person). Some people are sincerely evil. Some people mean
well, but really mess up big-time with historical consequences. Perhaps the
poster child for good intentions gone awry should be Warwick Kerr, the Brazilian
entomologist who introduced the Africanized honeybee to the Americas. There are
a couple of important reasons why these critters should not be referred to as
"killer bees". First of all, this misnomer is an invention of the
"B" movie industry (no pun intended) who gave these imaginary
bees such unbeelike characteristics as a lust for world domination and a taste
for the blood of scantily clad and buxom starlets. Africanized honeybees are not
killers. They are merely overzealous defenders of their homes and families,
which should be a characteristic to be admired (if only from a distance). Suffice it to say that it was not the peckish temperament of
the Africanized honeybees that made them attractive to Warwick Kerr. European
honeybees, those sweet-tempered and industrious insects so skillfully tended by
your friends and neighbors, were not very efficient honey producers in the
Brazilian environment. Kerr knew that African honeybees were more efficient at
making honey in areas where flowers were more scarce and widely scattered. In
1956 he brought some of these bees to Brazil in what seemed to be a carefully
controlled experiment. He reasoned that he might be able to breed African bees
with their gentler European cousins to produce a gentle and hardy strain that
would make commercial honey production viable in Brazil. He was about 33% right
-- they were hardy. Accounts vary as to how it happened, but Kerr's little
experiment literally got away from him in the form of 26 escaped African queen
bees. These bees did a sort of freelance continuation of Kerr's
experiment. Unfortunately they had their own agenda which did not include being
gentle or making honey for humans. They have spent the thirty years since their
escape breeding, multiplying, interbreeding, and migrating, displacing European
honeybees as they moved along. The migration seems to have run out of steam
since the first naturally migrating Africanized honeybee swarm was discovered
near Blythe, California on the Arizona border in October of 1994. In California
they are still restricted to a very small area in the southeast corner of the
state. On the positive side, some enterprising beekeepers along the
way have developed methods for containing and domesticating the resultant hybrid
bees. By some accounts these bees have in fact done quite well at producing
honey for some beekeepers in some situations. However, there are several factors
including their defensive behavior which make them a threat to the normal and
necessary activities of beekeeping in California. At the Shasta Mosquito and
Vector Control District our concern with honeybees has to do with public health
and safety rather than the intricacies of beekeeping. However, knowledge is
probably the greatest safety tool the public can use, so I am going to give some
information on the possible effects of Africanized honeybees on commercial
beekeeping. As tasty as honey is, it is not the most important thing
beekeepers provide for us. Pollination by bees is estimated to be responsible
for one third of all the food we eat. Therefore most of the work done by
beekeepers involves trucking large numbers of hives to pollination contracts.
Most commercial beekeepers keep their hives on pallets to facilitate quick
loading and relocation of their bee yards. Africanized honeybees do not like to
have their hives kept in close proximity to one another or moved. Their response
to such insults is to either sting something or abandon the hive (queen and all)
and seek a more solitary and undisturbed location to take up residence. This
latter behavior, called absconding, is very rare in European honeybees and very
common in Africanized honeybees. Since bees in the hive are money in the bank to
a beekeeper, their profits abscond with the bees. What absconding means to the
citizen on the street is that complete hives full of Africanized honeybees may
very suddenly appear in sheds, caves, hollow trees, attics or basements where
there has never been previous bee activity. This has also been one of the
factors enhancing their migration from South America to the U.S. Another Africanized honeybee trait that is a detriment to
commercial beekeeping is that they prefer to use their stored honey to produce
and feed baby bees, rather than saving it for a rainy day like their European
counterparts. Again this means lost profits to beekeepers and more wild
Africanized bees for the public to contend with. There are other technical
problems with the way bees behave within the hive that are of concern to
beekeepers. For this reason commercial beekeepers work very hard to maintain
pure, high quality European honeybees in their hives. The production and
marketing of carefully bred queen bees by Palo Cedro beekeepers is an important
link in ensuring the ability of commercial beekeepers to conduct a viable
business and ensure the safety of the public that they feed through their work. Because of their limited range and great distance from Shasta County, the Shasta Mosquito and Vector Control District does not currently consider the Africanized honeybee to be a significant public health risk in this part of the state. However, the one prediction about Africanized honeybees which has proved true since their introduction to Brazil is that they are not predictable. Therefore my next article will be about the status of the Africanized honeybee migration, and what people need to know when confronted with a possible nasty bee situation. For more information on Africanized honeybees and other stinging insects call the Shasta Mosquito and Vector Control District at (530)365-3768. Information is also available through links to our web site at shastamosquito.org. To see a follow-up article on AHB click on this link. Both of these articles were written in 1997. For More Information:
(530) 365-3768 For Brochures about AHB and other vector-related subjects follow this link.
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