Tracking the Killer Bees : As the Fabled Africanized Honeybees Make Their Way Toward California, a Few Men Have Been patrolling the Front Lines of the Invasion: The Bee Cowboys of South Texas.

U.S. 83 is a crooked line in the Rio Grande Valley. Hawks ride heat currents over the road. The chirr of dog-day cicadas, summer insects that solicit sex by rattling sheets of skin under their bellies, gives August afternoons a sound like the sizzle on a grill. Highway 83 runs north and west near Brownsville, paralleling the big river to the south. A poster on a phone pole reads “Buy your life insurance now! The killer bees are here.”

Weslaco, a hot, flat town with a population of 26,000, straddles the highway between Brownsville and Laredo. Here in the toe tip of Texas, a clutch of cinder-block buildings shimmers in 100-degree heat. This is the Texas Agricultural Experiment Station, an outpost of the United States Honeybee Management Program, which started doing “killer bee” research in 1990.

I was in Weslaco doing research for a book on pest control. Like everyone else, I had heard tall tales about superbees at the border. I went to the Rio Grande Valley three years ago because that was where the insects were entering the United States. It is the only part of the country where killer bees are an established fact of life, a regional hazard like scorpions and hurricanes. I knew that what happened in Texas--widespread fear, occasional stingings, bee-safety programs in schools--was coming soon to other Sun Belt states. (The bees have now entered California; they should reach Los Angeles next year.)

From my first encounter with the bees and the people who hunt them to my most recent chat with a Texas bee specialist, the level of panic there has died down. That seems to be the pattern of this invasion: initial frenzy followed by something close to normalcy. Only Texans have lived with the bees long enough to reach that point, however. For others in the Southwest, bee problems lie ahead.

Californians can learn from government scientists stationed in Texas as well as from regular folks who have adapted to the bees and now view them with respect rather than terror. But the ones who know the most are the few government workers who are the grunts in this battle, the ones who have manned the front lines since the bees came north. These men are the ones who know what happens when the first wave of killer bees arrives. They’re the hands-on experts in their field--the hard-bitten and hard-stung “bee cowboys” of South Texas.

On my first day in the Rio Grande Valley, I found Jim Sopczyk and Waylon Chandler in the parking lot behind the Ag Station, disputing.

Sopczyk and Chandler were apiary inspectors. Such men ordinarily check commercial beehives for parasitic mites and diseases like foulbrood. But when the first Africanized bees (so called because their progenitors were imported from Africa to Brazil) entered the United States four years ago, Sopczyk and Chandler became bee killers. Sopczyk, 44, is moon-faced, with windblown hair the color of honey. That day he wore his usual expression, that of a man whose tongue tastes like a lemon. Chandler, 74 years old, is tall and leathery, with short gray hair and silver-framed spectacles that mirror the sun. He took a fat burlap sack from the bed of his pickup truck.

“African?” Sopczyk asked.

Chandler nodded. “They looked African to me. They sounded African, so I killed ‘em as African.” He upended the sack. About 3,000 crisp dead bees spilled out. They smelled vaguely sweet, piling up like Cracker Jack.

Africanized “killer” bees look like any other bees. This batch could not be officially identified, Sopczyk told me, until he sent a few to a USDA lab that was open for business 24 hours a day, seven days a week. There, entomologists would use microscopes to confirm what Waylon Chandler claimed he already knew.

“African bees take off with a noise like a fiddle, a fiddle tuning up,” he said. “My daddy played the fiddle, so I know.”

Sopczyk knew it was scientifically impossible to identify bees by ear. Still, he could not dispute his partner’s folk wisdom. Sopczyk lost the upper range of his hearing 25 years ago, flying helicopters in Vietnam. “I don’t know, Waylon,” he said.

“Zzzz!” Chandler’s face lit up. “That’s the sound.”

Weslaco’s bee cowboys were macho men who always worked in their shirt sleeves. They both owned bee suits--hooded white overalls outfitted with face screens called veils--but the Rio Grande Valley was too hot for such gear, and they were too proud. Bee suits were fine for the scientists stationed here, but Sopczyk and Chandler, who had each been stung hundreds of times, figured that real men didn’t wear veils.

They were both longtime beekeepers, which is to say bee lovers. They didn’t enjoy exterminating killer bees, tough little critters whose main crime was a fierce talent for survival. They took the job to help defend Texans as well as Texas’ $11-million-plus beekeeping industry, which relies on gentle domestic bees--the “European” kind--to make honey and pollinate crops. Productive domestic hives were being infiltrated by invaders from the south, feral insects that were far less eager to serve mankind.

Sopczyk and Chandler knew that the invaders were not superbees. Like other bees, they die when they sting, and their stingers dispense no more venom than those of other bees. But it is also true that while a threatened colony of Eurobees might sting an intruder a dozen times, pursuing him for 100 yards, a killer colony stings en masse and may chase its victims for a mile. “We’ve been lucky so far,” Sopczyk said. So far, only one American has died under a blanket of the new bees. It happened last year when a valley rancher, Lino Lopez, took a torch to a feral colony. The bees’ stings, combined with the elderly Lopez’s panic, stopped his heart.

I asked the bee men why there hadn’t been more deaths. They had a four fold answer. One, the Rio Grande Valley, the first part of the United States to be invaded, was too sparsely populated to furnish many human targets. Two, the war had just begun; the early ‘90s were a prologue, with billions of bad bees still to come. Three, those Weslaco cowboys, Chandler and Sopczyk, probably scared a lot of bees away. And four, luck. Killer bees may respond to threats explosively, but they don’t fly very fast, with a top speed of 15 miles per hour. Escaping is as easy as fleeing from the “Frankenstein” movie monster: You’ll be fine as long as you don’t trip and twist your ankle.

Nodding at the mound of dead bees in Chandler’s truck, Sopczyk alluded to the new bees’ reproductive talent. “That’s 12 swarms we won’t have to deal with next year,” he said.

Twelve times 2,500, the number of individuals in a small swarm, is 30,000. By killing this swarm, Chandler short-circuited the process and prevented the birth of several million bees a few years hence.

That day, Chandler answered a call from a scared citizen. He fired up his truck and drove west on U.S. 83, past cotton fields and green rows of sugar cane to Roma, Tex., population 8,000. At that moment, there were as many bees on a single tree branch in Roma as there were people in the town. Hanging from a mesquite tree, the Roma swarm was a clump of bees that held one queen, a small coterie of male drones and a few thousand female workers. Chandler killed them with laundry soap.

Why soap? Entomologists tested many poisons on captive bees. Their experiments had some poignancy: Wooden crosses served as the bees’ Golgotha. “Each hive’s queen was placed in a wooden cage and taped to the center of the cross to serve as a clustering site,” a researcher reported. One poison “produced a slow death, and immobilized honeybees lay twisting in a mass for about 30 minutes.” One insecticide, resmethrin, killed some bees but merely dispersed others. (Sopczyk, who has used resmethrin, says it “really roars them up, makes them come out of a wall like darts. They’re dead, but they don’t know it yet.”) But for Chandler and Sopczyk, the best apicide was plain old detergent. Liquid Tide slicked the bugs’ breathing tubes, allowing the soapy water to enter their bodies. The bees drowned.

Chandler bagged his dead swarm and trucked it back to Weslaco. He parked behind the Ag Station, where Sopczyk and I met him. The bee men joked about an endorsement deal: They wouldn’t mind appearing on packages of Tide, like the ballplayers on Wheaties boxes.

One live bee crawled among the dead in the bed of Chandler’s truck. She was a worker. Almost all bees are workers, and all workers are female. Each colony includes a few males, the stingless drones whose sole function is to mate once with a queen, but the society of bees needs far more workers. Workers forage for nectar, fly that precious food to the hive and turn it into honey. They feed the queen and drones, insects so specialized for reproduction that they do not feed themselves. Workers defend and clean the hive and air-condition it with the beating of their wings. They work until they die and are cleaned from the hive by other workers.

This one’s frayed wings betrayed her dotage. She was about a month old. Sopczyk picked her up by the wings. He showed her to me and said, “Here’s how you take a stinger out.” He jabbed the bee butt-first into the soft flesh of his wrist. “Don’t pull it. Scrape it out. There’s a venom sac attached to the stinger; if you pull it, you’ll pump more venom into your arm,” he said. Dropping the bee, he popped the stinger out with an expert flick of his thumbnail.

His demo bee crawled zigzags on the tarmac at his feet. Inches away, her disembodied stinger throbbed microscopically as the venom sac contracted, pumping poison. It would continue to cramp for about a minute and might outlive the rest of the bee. She had shot her wad, to use a sexually incorrect phrase. A worker’s stinger, which is barbed to catch and hold an enemy’s skin, plucks out her entrails in the act of stinging. Disemboweled, she dies for her kin.

“Jim, you killed my one live bee,” Chandler drawled.

“Did you want that one?”

“Nah, it’s OK. I got the queen.” Chandler held the Roma queen, which was floating in alcohol in a four-inch plastic bottle. She was half again a worker’s size, striped black and gold like a cheerleader’s skirt. A few days earlier, driven by an idea the poet-essayist Maurice Maeterlinck called “the genius of the race,” this jumbo bee with a brain the size of a pencil point had drawn her thousands from their mother hive into the skies of south Texas. Her swarm was a slowly flying cluster of bees searching for a dark, safe place to hide.

Befitting her station in life, the queen lived longer than the rest. A pampered egg machine fed and groomed by 10 generations of her sisters and daughters, she may have been 5 years old. She lived longest even when the U.S. Honeybee Management Program came calling, but Chandler’s soap was too much for her.

“African,” he said, holding her up for Sopczyk to see. The queen was not noble or dreadful. She was not much of a queen anymore, just a bug.

If you were a Texas bee inspector in the early years of the invasion, this is some of what you learned about Africanized bees: In 1956 a Brazilian entomologist, Warwick Kerr, brought queen bees from South Africa to his laboratory in Brazil. Kerr admired the African honeybee, which is called AHB in scientific literature. Compared to the European breed (EHB), the African subspecies works harder to turn nectar and pollen into honey, and to turn honey into more and more bees. AHBs had to work hard: They evolved in a region where food is scarce, life cruel and brief. Of course they sting like demons, too--another result of their harsh habitat.

Biology provides a chemical trigger for their temper. When a bee stings, glands attached to its stinger release alarm pheromone, a substance that angers other bees and marks the stung foe as a target. AHBs release more alarm pheromone than EHBs and are more sensitive to its scent. While a European sting might incite a dozen more, an AHB sting tends to start a riot of stinging. One USDA study counted 1,500 stings in a target exposed for 60 seconds.

Kerr hoped to tame the Africanized bees by crossing them with EHBs. He wanted to create a better bee, a hybrid that would make Brazil the world’s leading honey producer. Instead, 26 of his imported queens slipped out of his experimental hives and escaped into the jungle. Their progeny doubled and redoubled their numbers, sometimes by literally enslaving EHB colonies. If threatened, they dispatched thousands of worker-fighters in an instant. They have been called abejas bravas and abejas asesinas --”assassins . “

Moving northward through South and Central America, they killed hundreds of people and thousands of animals. Horses and dogs were particularly at risk because they were often tied and could not escape. By 1989, the bees were in Mexico, just south of the Rio Grande. American officials tried to quell public fears. Killer bees were not nearly as bad as other dangers, they said. The average American was more likely to be hit by lightning or bitten by a rattlesnake than stung by AHBs. Still, as one bee hunter observed dryly, “Rattlesnakes don’t fly.”

The odds did not help Inn Siang Ooi, a University of Miami graduate student who took a field trip to Costa Rica in 1986. He stepped in a crack just inside a cave, disturbing a feral colony, and from the frightful moment when he knew his foot was stuck until long after he was dead, he was stung almost 8,000 times.

In October, 1990, the bees entered Texas.

Anita Collins, research leader of the honeybee unit of the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service in Weslaco, told me that AHBs are a minimal threat to public health. She is more worried about their economic impact. “It’s an attention-grabbing subject, and the words used by the media--killer bees!--play on the fears people have of insects, so we do have to deal with the idea of this giant bee that’s gonna come down and carry kids away,” Collins said. “That’s not reality. Yes, we’ll have stingings, but the United States has an excellent emergency health-care system, and we will coexist with these bees. But there’s another concern here. Africanized bees could disrupt beekeeping, and therefore American agriculture.”

Collins frets about the billions of dollars’ worth of groceries the EHBs help produce each year--crops that constitute a third of the American diet. If Kerr’s bees upset the partnership of pollinating EHBs and Southwest farmers and orchardmen, the result could be disastrous.

Last summer, Collins collected AHB semen for injection into EHB queens, hoping to accelerate the hybridization of the two breeds. Success might mean the protection of $800 million in crops that EHBs pollinate annually in Texas, and ultimately the defense of a major sector of U.S. agriculture. “As a geneticist, that would really appeal to me,” she said. It would mean she had created the new, better bee that Warwick Kerr had meant to make.

In another Weslaco office sat Collins’ colleague from Texas A & M University, Frank Eischen. A long-faced, gray-bearded man dressed in a white work shirt, jeans and cowboy boots, he looked like Freud at a rodeo. On his door was a cartoon showing an angry nest of killer bees; under the nest was Winnie the Pooh, keeled over dead. The new bees are “tough,” Eischen said. “They’ve been challenged by nature, quite vigorously, and survived.” Along with Collins, his boss, he was launching a program that entailed raising Africanized colonies in Texas, “for research purposes only, and with strict safeguards” to prevent their escape. I asked whether he worried that his safeguards, like Kerr’s, might fail.

“That shouldn’t happen, but it is my nightmare,” Eischen said. “A pretty little girl gets stung, or worse--a pretty little girl who’s the daughter of someone important.”

Meanwhile, back in Brazil, Warwick Kerr was busy with experiments on a rare breed of bee that cannot sting. In 1991, a proud, barely chastened Kerr told the New Yorker’s Wallace White of his many awards and his satisfaction with his career. Would he change anything if he could? “I would leave those African bees where I found them,” he said.

Jim Sopczyk climbed out of his blue Chevy pickup truck into triple-digit heat. Looking grumpy, as usual, he squinted at a stucco apartment block, a pair of rusted sedans, a tricycle, a rooster chasing a hen under wash lines hung with laundry. He ambled around the block, peering up through sparse branches, and found what he was looking for in a desert willow. A clump of long, slender insects buzzed around a papery nest the size and color of a softball. “False alarm,” he said. “It’s wasps.”

Sopczyk trudged to his truck. He returned carrying a Sears Craftsman leaf blower. Switching the blower’s control to reverse, yanking its starter, he aimed it at the wasps. With a thwop, the nest disappeared down the leaf blower’s barrel. He waved the barrel in the air, collecting stragglers, then touched it to the ground, sucking up a pound or more of dirt, burying the wasps inside the machine. “That’ll do it,” he said.

There were five apiary inspectors in Texas, but only the two based at Weslaco, Sopczyk and his partner Chandler, were primarily bee killers. Chandler was a canny old lifer, while Sopczyk, at 44, was “the youngster,” as Chandler put it. The youngster made no effort to hide his disdain for his bosses, the “paper pushers” the government had sent here, but he liked the regular folks of the valley so much that he changed the pronunciation of his name to suit them. Texans had trouble seeing Sopczyk and saying “Sop-chik,” so he became Subject. Everyone called him Jim Subject. The business card he handed you when your bees were dead in the yard read “Jim Sopczyk (Subject), Apiary Inspector.”

Regular folks were scared. They thought anything that flew, crawled or buzzed was a killer bee. Sopczyk saved a terrified woman from what she said were brown killer bees crawling up her porch. “Lady, those are ants,” he said. A man called Weslaco to say he’d seen the bees tearing branches from trees. A priest heard a buzz in his rectory wall; calling for help, he said, “I’m sorry, but I don’t do exorcisms.”

There were real alarms as well. Sopczyk chased bees that were on a cherry picker at a construction site, where a swarm had clustered near a welder. He killed AHBs in irrigation culverts, doghouses, a choir loft and an oil derrick. One swarm had taken over a mothballed copying machine and begun merrily turning out honey.

He often visited homes where the bees had built honeycombs in wall voids. Unless there were mice around to feast on the comb after Sopczyk did his job, homeowners might soon be treated to a strange sight: the dead colony’s honey, no longer cooled by workers’ wings, melting through cracks in the walls.

In the end, bee trouble always has to do with protecting honey.

Plants offer nectar, a sweet liquid, to bees in exchange for pollination services. Worker bees collecting nectar inadvertently gather pollen on their bodies and take it to other flowers, allowing plants to reproduce. The colors and patterns of flowers, so cherished by lovers and poets, are actually advertisements for bees--enticing signals to the 12,000 eyes in a bee’s head.

Finding a new apple tree or flower bed, a worker bee hurries home to her sisters. Her agitation alerts them to the good news she brings. The intricate gyre she performs in the pitch-dark hive--quickly copied by her kin, passed from body to body in a humming mass--relays her news. As she dances, the worker imparts the location of her discovery in terms of the sun’s position. If her find was sunward from the hive, she moves directly up the honeycomb. If it was in the opposite direction, she moves straight down. Angles to the left or right indicate other directions with perfect precision. Distance is told by the speed of her dance. The level of her agitation, ranging from mild to feverish, tells the richness of the food source. This is the way that worker bees make maps, shouting their good fortune by dancing in the dark.

EHB and AHB workers dance the same way. Africanized bees, however, are readier to defend themselves and their honey, the hive’s only fuel. Their history holds the reason: Unlike the pampered bugs of Europe and America, AHBs evolved in a cruel African habitat. They fought predators as though their survival was at stake every day, which it was.

In Weslaco, Sopczyk grabbed the phone. He spent a minute calming a worried taxpayer. “No, it’s probably wasps. If the nest is small, and you’re only seeing a few. . . .”

His voice wasn’t the only sound in the room. Sopczyk’s office hummed with the insistent white noise of trapped bees. Atop a rank of file cabinets were 23 coffee cans he had commandeered from trash baskets in the Ag Station. Bees flew inside the cans. They bounced audibly off the wire mesh taped to the cans’ open ends, their buzz a shade more shrill than that of free honeybees. These were angry, frustrated insects.

Before his next wasp chase, Sopczyk took time to explain his canned bees. The diameter of a coffee can, he said, neatly matched the mouth of his leaf blower. So he would cut the bottom off an empty can, making a tube, then tape wire mesh over one end. The can now plugged into the leaf blower’s barrel like a silencer on a gun, with the screened end inside the barrel. By switching the blower to reverse, he could sample killer bees. “They fly by that barrel and make a quick turn. Pop!” After catching 10 to 20 workers, he would fit the can’s lid onto its outward end, trapping them. Then he could kill the rest of the bees and bring his sample back to Weslaco.

Of course, no invention is perfect. The gas-powered blower could run for nine minutes. “One time, a real spicy colony, I thought I was going to run out of gas before I ran out of bees,” he said. With no time to fetch his soap sprayer, he kept filling coffee cans until there were too few bees to kill him. After that he never forgot to top off the blower’s gas tank before work.

The cans in Sopczyk’s office would not hum for long. Every few days he left some of them in a freezer overnight. Doubly trapped now, the bees would briefly form a tight ball to share body heat--their instinctive response to cold weather--before they died. If the bees had been involved in a serious stinging incident, he dropped a few of them into plastic specimen bottles and sent them Airborne Express to a government lab in Beltsville, Md. As for the frozen dead that were not sent to Beltsville, AHBs and EHBs alike went into the trash, sharing space as they never did in the wild.

Again the phone buzzed. “This is Jim Subject,” he said. “OK, how many do you see?”

Waylon Chandler ambled into the room. He gave his partner a quick salute.

“Stay there. Not too close. I’ll be right out,” Sopczyk said. Hanging up, he looked at Chandler. “This guy wants to know what we’re gonna do about all these bees.”

“Well, Jim, I think we should kill them.”

Sopczyk drove west on Texas 107. He zigged onto a dirt road that led to a gravel drive that led to a hackberry tree, where a large swarm had come to rest.

Eleazar Zamora lived in a brick house the color of a Folgers coffee can. Zamora, a welder who had come home from work to keep an eye on his children, popped out of the house when Sopczyk arrived. “I was scared the kids would bother the bees,” he said. He was also worried for his mother, who watched wide-eyed from a window in a long white trailer next door, firing questions in Spanish. Her son replied in English, “It’s OK, it’s OK, it’s OK.” He showed Sopczyk the bees. They were eight feet up in the hackberry, which spread its dry branches between the trailer and a blue Camaro.

“Probably African,” Sopczyk said. “Good bees don’t swarm much this time of year.” He said they might stay overnight, maybe two nights, and then move on. But if the workers kept scouting the area without finding a better home, they might build a nest here. That meant honey, eggs and larvae, which the bees would fight for. “Then they’d go after anything that bugged them--a lawn mower, a car engine, a kid throwing rocks.”

The swarm was the size of a bowling ball and contained about 4,000 bees. Its mother colony had grown so large, the queen’s pheromonal messages could not pass easily among so many bees, so it was time to swarm, to make two colonies from one. Workers now fed a protein-rich substance, royal jelly, to an ordinary larva, creating a new queen. Other workers seized the old queen. Pushing and biting, they forced her to the hive’s entrance. She was carried along with thousands of her sisters as the swarm burst from the nest and flew in tight formation around her, finally pausing in Eleazar Zamora’s yard.

The swarm was silent. The buzzing of bees is the sound of their wings beating, but wings weren’t needed now. These bees were content to crawl among each other, protecting and warming their queen.

Sopczyk used his leaf blower to fill a coffee can, reaching up to whisk a dozen bees from the clump. The rest of the swarm did not object. He went to the truck for his soap sprayer. It was a Chapin poly tank, hard blue plastic with a 1.3-gallon tank, the sort of sprayer gardeners use to kill aphids. The tank held an inch of Liquid Tide. Sopczyk found a garden hose by the house. He filled the tank and pumped up the pressure by hand, pressing the pump’s handle until it moved like a spoon in cold honey. He squeezed the sprayer’s trigger. Sudsy water shot 20 feet, a jet of bubbles in the sun.

“Do you want to see how they feel?” he asked me.

I followed his gaze. “How the bees feel?”

“You can touch them. They won’t sting,” he said with a twist of his lip.

“Probably.”

It was tempting. I knew that swarms were far less dangerous than established colonies. But AHB swarms had been known to turn killer in no time.

Sopczyk stood by with his poison Tide. He would protect me. The risk was dozens of stings, not thousands. Still, thinking of boyhood stings, the fiery bite of one stinger in my bare foot, I looked for a reason to keep my hands in my pockets.

“They’re up too high,” I said.

Zamora stole that excuse by dragging a cement block to the tree. Sopczyk nodded his approval. I stood on the block and reached up. I expected the swarm to feel rough, all those stingers as prickly as cactus spines, but the bees’ stingers were sheathed now; I was no imminent threat.

The swarm was warm to the touch. It was soft, a living beanbag calmly rustling under my fingertips. I probed the bee ball, moving my fingers into and under its surface. The bees made room for me. Soon my hand was part of the swarm. Collins had told me that swarming bees could be gentle as lambs, but these were gentler. A lamb flees a stranger’s hand. This swarm accepted my hand, incorporated it, moved and breathed under and between my fingers, gentle as a swarm of killer bees. I parted from them reluctantly when Sopczyk said it was time.

“Do you want to spray them?” he said.

“No, thanks.”

Zamora and I flinched when Sopczyk’s spray hit the bees. They dropped off the cluster in chunks. Finally Sopczyk sprayed the last chunk. It fell, and then he stomped it dead, 100 or so bees, including the queen.

There were dozens of bees in the air. They flew drunkenly, heavy-winged and poisoned. A worker landed on my shirt. She crawled to my shoulder where I could see her up close. She was trying to clean her eyes. She scraped with quick mechanical strokes, her forelegs moving like windshield wipers, until one leg tapped one lens or a small group of them--the most clouded or painful, it seemed to me--with special worry for a moment before the robot impulse reasserted itself and her legs worked again in failed concert all over her eyes. Before long, she tumbled down my sleeve.

IN 38 YEARS, THE OFF-spring of Warwick Kerr’s handful of queen bees have colonized two continents, 20 nations and more than 6 million square miles. There are perhaps a trillion of them south of the border, many millions in Texas, and soon there will be millions in California.

Last spring, Africanized bees were detected in Yuma, Ariz., three miles from the California border. A few have been detected in Imperial County, with Riverside and San Diego counties next on the list. They will colonize Los Angeles soon, perhaps by next summer. Local schoolchildren can see bee-safety videos on Channel 58, and the Los Angeles County Fire Department has ordered 1,000 bee suits. Unfortunately, because of complex regulations, the best pesticide is against the rules here. Using laundry soap to kill bees currently violates California law. Individual states must specifically allow a particular poison to be used on a particular pest; using soap on aphids, for instance, is perfectly legal in California, but the state has yet to officially allow soap on bees.

“We’ll use foam,” said a Fire Department spokesman, apparently unaware of what Texans have learned: Foam from fire extinguishers angers the bees without hurting them very much. That’s why, when a feral colony of a couple thousand AHBs hitchhiked from Guatemala to Los Angeles on a cargo ship in July, it took hooded, veiled government workers 90 minutes to kill them--a job Sopczyk could have done in five minutes.

No one knows what will happen when AHBs swarm Los Angeles County. Elba Quintero, national coordinator of the USDA’s Africanized Honeybee Program, advises caution but not fear. “It is OK for people in California to be concerned, to be more aware of bees,” Quintero says, “but they shouldn’t be scared. They should remember that we have had Africanized bees in this country for four years now, and only one person has died.”

As recently as Aug. 23, however, Christopher Graves was stung 1,000 times in Robstown, Tex., just north of the Valley. He survived.

In the end, Africanized bees are not really much of a threat to public health. Still, they change the lives of people who encounter them. Frank Eischen, the biologist and bee admirer, now packs a syringe and a dose of adrenaline, the bee venom antidote, in his first aid kit. “You can’t be too careful,” he says. Eischen thanks his lucky stars for one thing: The research project he and Anita Collins launched hasn’t backfired. Not one of their bees has escaped.

More important in the scientists’ view, however, are three other recent discoveries. The first is geographic: As wild AHBs move farther north, “they’re running out of steam,” says Eischen. He suspects that North America’s chilly climate will finally stop the bees cold; they may never claim much territory north of Los Angeles, Dallas and Atlanta. A second positive sign is that AHBs seem to be susceptible to a common parasitic mite called varroa, which might also slow their northward advance.

A third new development is more ominous. It shows what talented survivors AHBs can be. In her lab, Weslaco science chief Collins has seen Africanized queens developing faster than their European counterparts. The difference may be only a few hours, but timing is all that matters in the wild. When a colony needs a new queen, workers feed royal jelly to many larvae--the white worms growing in the hive’s wax incubators--but only the quickest survives. Upon hatching, she kills all other royal larvae, her potential rivals, before settling down to produce millions of eggs of her own kind. By hatching first, one AHB larva (the result of one mating among the dozen or so the previous EHB queen may have had) can turn a tame hive into a killer bee assembly line.

AS THE BEES MOVED--north from the Rio Grande Valley toward Houston, apiary inspector Waylon Chandler followed them. Sopczyk’s old partner now stands sentinel in Jasper County near the Louisiana border. His job is to catch and sample swarms in order to help scientists track AHBs’ progress--though he would surely recognize them by their sound. “There’s not any here yet,” Chandler says, “but I’m looking out for them. Some beekeepers are about to throw up their hands and quit. Other people here don’t know what to think, but they’ll be as excitable as folks in the valley once those bad bees get here--excitable like the bees.”

Jim Sopczyk stayed in the Valley. Soon after he wiped out the swarm on Zamora’s property, he killed 10,000 AHBs attached to a trailer in Santa Rosa, Tex. They dished out more than 200 stings to the trailer’s owner before she escaped. But Sopczyk bent a rule. Apiary inspectors are allowed to kill any bees they find in the open and were encouraged to call in licensed exterminators to kill bees inside or attached to someone’s home. “A technicality,” he sniffed. “If there are people around who might get stung, I’m going to do my job.” After the Santa Rosa job, he was cautioned by Paul Jackson, the state’s chief inspector, who said Sopczyk had screwed up, “rashly killing” killer bees.

“My reaction to that was ‘Go to hell,’ ” said Sopczyk. Soon Jackson, who was short on payroll funds--and who had already been irritated when Sopczyk spoke freely to a reporter--offered Sopczyk a transfer to San Antonio: 19 hours a week with a cut in pay. Sopczyk said no. But though he still had his leaf blower and soap sprayer, as a private citizen he could kill bees only in his own back yard. “I finally found something I’m good at, and they won’t let me do it. I can’t do anything,” he said, shortly after, “because I’m not an exterminator.”

So he read books and took tests until he became a licensed exterminator, and today Sopczyk is president, serviceman and janitor for his own pest-control firm, Associated Critter Control. “I’m out there struggling, getting about a third of my work from bees.”

As Sopczyk’s “nasty little she-devils” move north and west into California, it is worth remembering that Apis mellifera isn’t the only adaptable species. In Brazil, beekeepers have learned caution: They now approach their AHB hives with veils and thick gloves, and Brazil’s honey production--thanks to hard-working Africanized bees--is much higher than ever before. In fact, the story will probably be the same here. Early panic will be followed by a transitional period, a territorial war between humans and bees. The war will be followed in turn by a tense coexistence--an uneasy truce between two deadly species, them and us.