The State - News from Aug. 2, 1985

State Department of Food and Agriculture officials will begin taking samples from the first of 9,200 commercial beehives in a 400-square-mile quarantine area of Central California today in an effort to track down and destroy Africanized honeybees believed to have emerged from an underground nest in an oil field about 45 miles northwest of Bakersfield. A spokesman said 50 bees will be taken from each hive over the next three weeks while a team of about 25 scientists and other workers continue to hunt down and exterminate all wild bee swarms within a 10-mile radius of the discovery site near Lost Hills. None of the so-called killer bees have been found outside the original nest, although 32 swarms of wild bees have been located and destroyed so far, department officials said. The state also is relying on calls from the public to find hives in a zone extending an additional 40 miles from the discovery site. The colony of Africanized bees was believed to have been brought to California accidentally in oil-drilling equipment shipped from Central America.