Advance of ‘Killers’ Keeps Scientists Busy as Bees : Entomology: It is hard to tell an Africanized honeybee from a regular one. Experts hope that interbreeding will reform the new strain.
Every morning about 10:30, a delivery man wheels his van up to an old brick building and hands over packages to people who are ready to rip their contents limb from limb.
The boxes are filled with bees--dead ones pickled in alcohol or packed in dry ice--and the recipients at the U.S. Department of Agriculture will tear them apart to find out if they are killer bees.
A bee is not a killer bee until the scientists in Beltsville say it is, but the autopsies on these insects are not done for idle curiosity. Tracking the Africanized bees’ northward migration into the United States, the Agriculture Department researchers are looking for clues to what makes them tick, how far they might travel and how they might be tamed.
It takes about four hours, a projector, ruler, microscope and computer to sort the critters out and, at the end of a printout with more numbers than a baseball box score, they get odds. That’s as positive as the identification gets.
Dr. Hachiro Shimanuki, a microbiologist in the bee lab for the Agriculture Department’s research service, has seen killer bees up close and alive.
“I’ve been stung a number of times,” he said.
Once, they really scared him. It was in Brazil, where the Africanized bees established their beachhead in the Western Hemisphere in the 1950s. They swarmed up and went for Shimanuki’s face, which was protected by the netting and hat beekeepers wear. The bees flung themselves at the headgear “like someone throwing pebbles,” he said.
After a while, he said, he got used to them and went about his work. The scientists say that’s what the rest of us are going to have to do, now that the bees are here. There’s no getting rid of them, so we’d better learn how to live with them.
Shimanuki goes out of the room and comes back with a small wooden box with brass latches. It looks like it might contain good cigars. Inside are about a hundred bees, dried, dead and pinned into neat rows.
On the left are killer bees. On the right are the docile European bees. The killer bees are somewhat smaller, but the difference is so slight that if you weren’t looking for it, you wouldn’t see it. The real difference is in their behavior.
The Africanized bee has the same venom as the European bee, and can sting only once before it dies. What makes killer bees killers is their willingness to sting and to attack en masse.
A researcher made a gizmo to measure this. It looks like a small plastic bottle with a wire coming out of the top. Whack a hive on the side and hang the gadget next to the hole, and it counts the number of stings it receives. European bees average about four stings a second; killer bees sting at a rate of 24 per second.
So, are the new bees just mean?
“Entomologists don’t view insects with personalities,” said Dr. Ralph Bram, one of the Agriculture Department’s top insect researchers. “It’s the way this particular species responds to a particular stimulus.”
The scientists figure that crossbreeding the killers with their more mellow cousins may settle them down. In the meantime, Shimanuki advises trying to avoid the “particular stimulus” that sets them off.
“People should be concerned about these bees and should tell their children not to provoke these bees,” Shimanuki said. “In most cases, if you leave the bees alone, the bees will also leave you alone.”
The researchers have come up with an effective defense against bee attacks: insect repellent. Really. Repellent with the active ingredient DEET drives the bees away if you spray it in the air around your head while you’re being attacked. Putting the repellent on ahead of time doesn’t help, however: You’ve got to spray the bees.
Also, and this is important: Run for your life, and keep running until you don’t hear (or even imagine you hear) any more angry buzzing.
The bees have been moving north about 300 miles a year since they escaped from a lab in Brazil in 1957, and are known to be in south Texas. In early June, a gardener there earned the painful distinction of being the first American attacked by killer bees in this country. He was stung about 30 times, and survived. It could have been a lot worse.
Bees from that swarm were sent to Beltsville for identification.
The Agriculture Department has four field operations in the South and Southwest to deal with Africanized honeybees, but they do only preliminary screening of suspected killers. For final identification, specimens are sprayed with insecticide, carefully packaged and shipped to the Agriculture Department’s research headquarters here in this Washington suburb.
At least 10 bees from a colony must be examined to determine the species. The lab works seven days a week and gets four or five samples a day that already have been screened by state or federal authorities in the field. They don’t want the public mailing bad bees to Beltsville.
“That’s what we’re afraid of--that people will just send samples of bees and there might be only one bee, and, of course, we can’t identify only one bee,” Shimanuki said.
And, of course, there’s the matter of packaging.
“You can’t just put them in an envelope,” Shimanuki said.
The Agriculture Department’s scientists are hopeful that there’s a way out of this problem. It’s just a question of breeding. They think that once the killer bees meet their docile cousins from Europe, they will interbreed and evolve into gentler creatures. That’s assuming that there are more European bees than killer bees. If it’s the other way around, the opposite could occur.
They also point out that the Americas are not alone in this problem. Israel is also plagued with its own strain of killer bees.
The Israelis call them Syrian bees.
