Beekeeper Wary About Arrival of a New Breed of Killer in L.A.
Amateur and professional beekeepers are watching with increasing alarm the northward migration of the Africanized honeybee, whose extremely aggressive behavior has earned it the name “killer bee.”
Inadvertently released in Brazil during a 1956 hybridization experiment, the Africanized bee has worked its way north, taking over colonies of the more docile European bees that are managed by beekeepers to produce honey and pollinate crops. In 1990 the Africanized bee entered the United States in Texas. Soon it will arrive in California, posing a threat of unknown dimensions to the state’s $18-million honey industry.
Amateur beekeeper Charles Duncan is in his third year as president of the Los Angeles County Beekeepers’ Assn. A retired aerospace engineer, he traveled to Venezuela in 1986 with a group of 50 beekeepers, both amateur and professional, to get a firsthand look at what they will have to contend with. He was interviewed by Times staff writer Doug Smith.
Question: Can you recognize an Africanized bee by its appearance?
Answer: No.
Q: Then how do you know when it’s taken over a colony?
A: Hostility. The only way you’re going to really be able to tell an African from a European is hostility.
Q: You saw the African bee in Venezuela. How hostile is it?
A: I just couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I’ve been covered with bees a number of times. I’ve been stung as many as 2,000 times, I think. It wasn’t anything like these guys. These guys just relentlessly would not let go, would not give up, no matter how far from the nest.
When we left them, they went with us, all the time. When I try to express this, this is hostility squared. Mean. They are mean.
Q: Can you give an example?
A: I saw three colonies in the tree. There was a black blob hanging in the tree. We picked up the cameras, and we were going to take pictures. About the time we were ready to snap, we’ve got them in focus, they were all over us. And this is from a distance of almost a city block away.
Q: Will the African bee simply force the European bee out of existence in the wild?
A: Yes. I don’t think it will ever happen that it’s 100%. But it can be a very big change in the feral colonies. The feral colonies may well be replaced to a great degree by Africans because the African tends to move into an area and then just kind of wipe it out.
Q: How does the Africanized bee take over a hive?
A: They just enter a hive, and they quickly fight and kill the existing queen. Within a very short time, you will have coming out of that colony young African bees. If you take European bees and Africans and mix them together, the Europeans start acting a little more like Africans. Very shortly, the whole hive just changes from a European colony to an African colony.
It can happen in a short period of time. We don’t know how short. But a working colony can be Africanized pretty quickly, unless that beekeeper is checking it on a routine basis, like maybe once a week.
Q: What can the beekeeper do to prevent this?
A: About the only way you can fix that is to re-queen. Quickly re-queen with a European queen and she will tend to control the production of children and it will go back to being a European colony again.
Q: How do you re-queen?
A: You have to find and kill the African. You can do that fairly easily.
Q: If it’s that easy, what’s the problem then?
A: Because every time a beekeeper goes to an apiary, there is expense involved. The beekeeper that has to go out and check his colony one more time, that’s fuel, that’s labor, that’s equipment. It all adds up. And it requires the cost of beekeeping to increase and increase.
You’re dealing with cost when you re-queen, because you’re looking at six or seven bucks a queen. So the beekeepers that are heads up, that are really on the ball, will re-queen every two years. Some re-queen every year. That’s a little tough to do.
Q: Will beekeepers be facing greater danger in their work now?
A: Yes, they will. In my opinion, they definitely will, and so will agricultural workers.
The inspections are going to be very difficult to make with the Africans, because they’re going to be chasing you like crazy. If you’re working with bees and they’re buzzing around you, that’s OK. But when there’s 4,000 of them encrusted on your veil and you have keep parting it to see through them, that get’s old quickly. It gets hard to breathe. It gets hard to think.
Q: And someone eventually will get lax and a whole apiary will become Africanized, with 50 hives?
A: Right. You wouldn’t imagine a man would get a herd of cattle and not know something about cattle. In the bee world you can get a herd of bees and not know a damn thing about them and think you are a beekeeper. You are not. You are a bee-haver. You have bees. When you get 20, 30 colonies, the bees will start managing you if don’t know how to manage them. And they will manage you to the point you won’t do anything with them that you should do.
So, the one who is a bee-haver, who has 50 colonies setting out someplace, that he will go see next month if he happens to have time, and doesn’t go for three months, can easily go African, and he won’t know it. But when he gets there, he will know it, because they will come out to meet him, greet him, and when that truck door slams, the bees will be there to say howdy, and they won’t be friendly. They’ll be quite hostile.
Q: Could that also pose a public safety problem?
A: Don’t know. It would depend where that apiary was.
Q: Did the professional beekeepers who went to Venezuela seem concerned?
A: Sunday night around the campfire--really around the dining room table--there are 50 guys and you hear all these stories about, “I won’t wear my gloves,” “I may not even put on a veil,” and “They can’t be as bad as all these people are saying.”
When went to the site the next morning with some not wearing gloves--all wearing veils, some wearing shirts and so forth without proper suits--within a short period of time we had some major problems. The guys who hadn’t suited up and prepared themselves properly were pretty badly stung.
That night at dinner, it was silent. You could hear a pin drop because each one of these guys was assessing, “What does this mean to me as a beekeeper in terms of my future?”
Q: How have the Venezuelans managed?
A: The Venezuelans are using the Africans, as I understand, by keeping a small number of colonies. They keep them quite a distance from any city, any livestock, any animals of any kind, which means now the number of sites is limited. It used to be that you could keep them on the front yard. You could keep them on the edge of town, anywhere. Now they’ve got to be way out.
They spread them out, one here and 50 feet away they have another one. You don’t want them close to each other, because the minute you’ve opened one, you might just as well have opened all four of them, because just your movement is going to upset all four. You’re going to have all four attacking you.
Q: Is there any effort to breed hostility out of the African bee?
A: There was an attempt made to flood a very large area with thousands upon thousands of European drones. My understanding was that what happened was the African breeds two hours later in the day than our European bees, and they got a mismatch there. Then that research kind of faded away, and they found that the Africans really just didn’t mate with the European drones very well. Why, I really don’t have an answer right now.
Apparently, when you combine the African bee with the European bee, the worst comes out again. The hostility doesn’t really go away.
Q: Does this mean the end of large-scale commercial beekeeping?
A: Is the African a serious problem? You darn well bet you it’s a serious problem. But I am not of the point of view that beekeepers are out of business. There is some sort of a solution.
