May Be Year Old : Killer Bees’ Hive Found; Hunt Widens

State agriculture officials revealed Thursday that a recently identified colony of Africanized honeybees built a sizable underground hive in which they have been flourishing, probably for more than a year.

Evidence uncovered near Bakersfield when a team of investigators unearthed the 5 1/2-foot-long hive indicates that one or more queen bees may have recently left the subterranean nest with swarms of the insects, which have been dubbed killer bees because of their aggressive behavior.

State Food and Agriculture Director Clare Berryhill said that an “emerged” queen had been present but had left the nest recently and that the original queen could not be found.

‘Well Convinced’

“We’re pretty well convinced that we have two queens and their colonies out there and possibly more,” Berryhill said. “It’s plenty serious if we’ve lost them.”

The Kern County discovery is believed to the first colony of the Africanized bees found in the United States.

The presence of the irregular, honeycomb-filled hive does not necessarily mean that the bees have in fact established additional colonies, said Isi Siddiqui, chief of plant industry for the state Department of Food and Agriculture.

“What is most encouraging is that we have still found no other colonies and no evidence that the Africanized bees have commingled with commercial bees,” Siddiqui said. “We are still hoping it is a single colony.”

However, Siddiqui’s remarks preceded the disclosure that one or more queens may have left the nest recently.

A team of 24 insect experts, traveling by foot and helicopter, is conducting a widening search for additional colonies in a 400-square-mile area in Kern County.

Found in Oil Field

Earlier in the day, 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, may 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 to perform a “rush” analysis.

At first, Berryhill and bee experts said that the colony may have been destroyed soon after its discovery. And the same experts, including beekeeper Steve Park, predicted that the bees would have difficulty surviving in the arid conditions of Kern County.

That belief appeared to be undermined later in the day when investigators dug into the hive and determined its size.

State officials are concerned that a spreading population of Africanized bees could cause serious problems both for the public and for growers who depend on domesticated European honeybees to pollinate their crops.

1,500 Hives in Area

Beekeepers in the 400-square-mile quarantine area northwest of Bakersfield near Interstate 5, have been told not to move their hives until a systematic search for Africanized bees is completed.

As many as 1,500 beehives have been identified in the area. About 50 bees will be taken from each hive to determine whether any are Africanized. Movement of any hives from the area will be prohibited until the tests are completed.

The Africanized bees represent 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.

Despite their being dubbed, “killer bees,” the Africanized insects are no more venomous than ordinary honeybees but they are much more likely to become agitated and attack an animal or person that disturbs them.

“They defend themselves much more vigorously and in much larger numbers,” said Anita Collins, a geneticist and bee expert at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Bee Breeding and Stock Center in Baton Rouge, La.

“If you stumble across one, run like hell,” Collins advised in a phone interview.

Finding an isolated Mediterranean fruit fly or Japanese beetle typically launches an emergency pest eradication program, largely because even a solitary insect from either species can lay hundreds of eggs and multiply extremely quickly.

But honeybees are social animals, Collins explained, and they cannot survive outside of colonies.

That is why officials had been optimistic that the Kern County discovery was an isolated situation. That optimism was dampened somewhat by the discovery of a large underground hive.

The fierce Africanized bees were first spotted more than a month ago by a skiploader 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.

Dug Their Way Out

He covered the hole with oil-soaked earth. But the next day, he noticed that some surviving bees had dug their way out of the covered burrow.

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

The bees did not arrive at the state Department of Food and Agriculture’s entomology laboratory until July 3, according to Siddiqui, who heads the department’s insect eradication programs.

The Kern County officials asked the lab to “please check for Africanized bees,” but they gave no indication of why they were concerned and failed to mark the samples with the order, “Rush,” Siddiqui said.

The laboratory is asked to identify 159,000 insect samples each year, he noted, and the bees collected in Kern County were not given special priority.

Department entomologist Marius Wasbauer took a series of careful measurements and identified the specimens as Africanized bees.

He then carried samples of the bees to the University of California, Berkeley, laboratory of Howell V. Daly, the expert who developed the techniques for identifying the Africanized bees.

To the untutored eye, an Africanized bee is virtually indistinguishable from domesticated honeybees. But careful measurements show subtle differences in size and structure that make it possible to tell the varieties apart.

Daly was able to say with more than 99% certainty that the Kern County bees were of the Africanized variety.

These bees are the result of a 1956 South American breeding experiment that crossed African bees with European varieties. Some of the hybridized bees escaped and started their own colonies. The Africanized bees began competing with the domesticated varieties, interbreeding with them and displacing them.

They have been moving northward at the rate of 200 miles a year, according to Daly.

But the northern advance has only reached as far as Central America, Daly said.

In Cleveland Last Year

That is why he and other scientists believe that the Kern County find is an isolated colony that was transported here inadvertently. A year ago, some Africanized bees were positively identified in Cleveland aboard a ship transporting material from South America.

In fact, there have been several such incidents in the United States in recent years, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Collins.

But the Kern County findings appear to be the first in the United States where the Africanized bees have actually formed a colony.

If additional colonies of the aggressive bees are discovered, they can be eradicated with common pesticides, according to Siddiqui. Ridding the state of the hybrid bees will be particularly important early next year, a time when about 600,000 beehives usually are brought into the state to pollinate almond trees.