Officials Hunt Fugitive Queen of ‘Killer Bees’

As insect experts searched a 400-square-mile area in Kern County for the fugitive queen of a swarm of Africanized honey bees, agriculture officials were hoping today that there was only a single colony of the aggressive “killer bees.”

Large numbers of the bees were killed by Kern County agricultural officials, who sprayed their adopted home in a kit fox burrow, but no queen for the swarm was found afterward.

“Not finding a queen is not a good sign,” Howell V. Daly, professor of entomology at the University of California, Berkeley, said. He added that survivors of the spraying and the queen may have shifted to a new home.

State Food and Agriculture Director Clare Berryhill told reporters that the bees, first found in a Kern County oil field in June and positively identified as the Africanized variety only this week, might have been brought into the country with oil equipment from South America.

The identification took several weeks, according to state officials, because the staff of the Kern County agriculture commissioner failed to ask the state insect laboratory for a rush analysis.

Possibly Destroyed

However, Berryhill, along with several of the state’s leading bee experts, believes that the colony may have been destroyed shortly after its discovery. And, experts say, the bees are unlikely to thrive in Kern County’s dry conditions and will probably not cause serious problems, either to the public or to growers who depend on domesticated European honey bees to pollinate crops.

However, beekeepers in the sizable quarantine area, located 60 miles northwest of Bakersfield near Interstate 5, have been told not to move their hives until the search for the “killers” is completed. The quarantine zone may hold as many as 1,500 hives.

Become Very Agitated

Africanized bees are no more venomous than ordinary honey bees, but they are much more likely to become agitated and attack an animal or person who disturbs them.

The bees are a serious threat to agriculture because they store relatively little honey and do not pollinate as great a variety of plants as domesticated European varieties.

The fearsome bees were first spotted more than a month ago by a skip-loader operator, William Wilson, working in an oil field near the town of Lost Hills. On June 25, Wilson watched with dismay as bees living in a kit fox burrow repeatedly attacked a cottontail rabbit.

He covered the hole with asphalt, but the next day he noticed that some surviving bees had dug their way out of the covered burrow.

Kern County officials applied an insecticide to kill the remaining bees and sent off samples for identification.