BEE LINE A LONELY ONE : County’s Lone Inspector on Alert for Killer Variety
Something was falling from the sky, and the people in Rolling Hills Estates didn’t know what to think. Tiny yellowish brown drops splattered cars, houses, people. Birds weren’t the problem--that much they could tell. They looked up and saw airliners. Jet fuel, perhaps?
Calls were placed last week to the South Coast Air Quality Management District, but the smog police knew better. This was a case, they said, for Mike Pearson.
Mike Pearson is a man who knows bee poop when he sees it. He is the one and only bee inspector in the Los Angeles County agricultural commissioner’s office--a lonely, obscure and potentially dangerous task that the public takes for granted. Even in summer, when such
hymenoptera (stinging insects) as honey bees, yellow jackets, wasps, hornets and bumblebees are at their nastiest, people seldom stop and think, gee, I wonder how the county bee inspector is doing today.
His Stature May Rise
But soon, Pearson’s stature may rise. If predictions come true, the mild-mannered bee inspector will be very much in demand, perhaps even a media darling, a film-at-11 kind of star, for he is the man who would stop the killer bees.
“They’re coming,” Pearson said from behind the net slung over his pith helmet the other day. It is not a matter of if , he said. The Africanized bees--Pearson prefers their proper name--have in three decades traveled from South Africa to South America to Mexico. Colonies are expected to arrive in California sometime in 1991. Your back yard, perhaps. . . .
A dozen regular old domestic bees buzzed about Pearson’s head. “When they do come,” he said, “there will be clouds of them around me.”
The bee-sting death of a 65-year-old farm worker in Fresno County who drove her truck Monday into a set of hives set off alarms among bee inspectors and beekeepers that perhaps the Africanized bees had arrived. Tests later showed that domestic honeybees had stung her an extraordinary 136 times. Unlike most bee-sting deaths, the victim apparently had no allergic reaction, but succumbed to the sheer volume of venom.
Fear Mass Attacks
When Africanized bees arrive, more of these sorts of mass attacks are feared. Their venom is no more potent than that of the domestic honey bee; the danger is their hostility--that something much less than a truck collision will stir their malevolence.
Frequent, sensational mention of killer bees in supermarket tabloids--alongside the usual Elvis sightings--has perhaps confused the facts about Africanized bees. “There’s been a lot of hype,” Pearson said.
But then, their true story is like bad science fiction, beginning with the work of a certain geneticist in the 1950s.
As reported in science journals, a geneticist brought African bees to Brazil in the 1950s, hoping to breed better honey producers than the indigenous variety, an earlier import from Europe. But the African bees--more hostile than the European variety--genetically overwhelmed, or “Africanized” their counterparts. The Africanized bees escaped into the wild and earned the nickname “killer” for swarming, sometimes fatal attacks on animals and humans.
Started as Student
Pearson, who developed a fascination for bees while he was a student at Cal Poly Pomona, became the county’s bee inspector in 1981. He figures that he has been stung about 100 times, including one incident in which he took 15 stings. He developed a fever, but was soon back among the bees.
He branched into the killer variety in 1985, when bee inspectors from throughout the state were mobilized after a pocket of Africanized bees had been discovered in an oil field in Lost Hills, near Bakersfield. A dead fox, rabbit and raven were found near their hive.
Apparently, the Africanized bees had hitched a ride from South America on a shipment of oil-drilling equipment. The successful eradication effort--14 separate colonies were identified and fumigated with no injuries to humans--makes Pearson optimistic about California’s ability to deal with killer bees.
At a recent symposium on the Africanized bee menace in San Diego, Pearson said, it was reported that up to 100 human deaths per year have been attributed to the bees in Venezuela alone. But Venezuelans, in some cases, attempted to capture the bees without wearing protective clothing or using proper equipment. Ignorance was the problem, Pearson suggested. “They’re not really killers unless they’re provoked,” he said.
Uses Scented Traps
Since the Lost Hills episode, Pearson’s killer bee vigil has consisted of checking 13 scented traps set at strategic locations around the county--the port, major truck routes, an oil field in Signal Hill. So far--Pearson is a little embarrassed to admit it--these traps haven’t even caught a stray domestic colony.
Still, the effort is considered so important that the county Board of Supervisors--after cutting funding for mental health--recently backed away from a proposal to cut funds for the Africanized bee detection effort. No politician, apparently, wants to seem pro-killer bee.
When they come, Pearson said, his duties will change radically. He envisions a task force of bee inspectors who roam the county, responding to reports of suspicious bee activity. The first detection, he said, will probably be in a hobbyists’ back-yard hive. Killer bees are known to attack and take over other hives, he said.
“They send out raiding parties and they’ll just fight their way in. Their queen will search out the other queen and kill her. A coup d’etat . . . . After a time, they’re all Africanized.”
It could happen to any one of the more than 30,000 domestic hives registered in the county, both commercial operations and those of hobbyists. Eighty of those hives--perhaps 250,000 individual honeybees--can be found in Marvin Griffin’s back yard in Rancho Palos Verdes. It was Griffin’s colonies, the bee inspector determined, that were fouling a certain neighborhood in nearby Rolling Hills Estates.
No Regulations
Rancho Palos Verdes, it turns out, has no ordinance to regulate beekeeping. Officials there say they are attempting to abate the nuisance as an illegal commercial enterprise in a residential zone. But Griffin says that won’t be necessary; he is now looking to move his hives to three more rural locations in Los Angeles and Kern counties.
Griffin, 46, who started his bee hobby 14 months ago with a single hive, is now an avid breeder and a trapper of wild colonies. He hopes to breed an extra-mild bee, he said, to contend with Africanized gene pools. “I love bees,” he said. “It’s like I finally found my niche in the world.”
The beekeeper, after being contacted by Pearson, said he was “flabbergasted” when he saw the mess his bees were making. One driveway was so dotted, he said, it looked like a test for color blindness.
“It’s a hobby,” he said, “that went a little wild.”
