Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, May 8, 1990 TAG: 9005080520
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Bob Willis
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
His maxim finds support in the story of the Africanized honeybee.
The ancestor of Apis mellifera adansonii was first discovered in South Africa and Tanzania. Among its traits is that it produces large amounts of honey. A scientist hoped to introduce that trait into South American bees by cross-breeding, so he brought several of them to Brazil for experiments.
Unfortunately, the African bees have other traits besides industriousness. They are irritable and aggressive. Easily aroused, they pursue perceived intruders long distances.
They are not bigger than other bees such as the gentler Italian variety common in the United States; nor is the sting of an individual African bee worse. It is their tendency to attack in large and lasting swarms, inflicting hundreds of stings, that has earned them the label "killer bees."
So much for background. If you read science fiction, you know what came next. A beekeeper visiting the experimental control area in Brazil in 1956 accidentally freed 26 African queen bees. The rest is not quite history, for the story is still unfolding, but the end does not look happy.
The African bees, introduced into a new environment, have defied all efforts to blunt their advance. They have moved steadily northward over the years, cross-breeding with other bees and taking over their territory. The hybrid has retained the aggressiveness of its African strain.
In 1974 entomologists predicted the Africanized bees would reach the United States by about 1990. That forecast is likely to be met later this year when the bees move into Texas. A few years after that, they will be in Virginia.
Obviously, the "killer bees" have not been wiping out all human life in their path. Unless you work around bees, you are not in appreciably greater danger because of the Africanized variety.
Their presence will take its toll in other ways. Farmers in this country depend on bees to pollinate many crops, such as vegetables and fruits; some keep hives for that purpose. But the Africanized bee resists domestication as well as being moved from one farm to another. American beekeepers will not be eager to handle them when an effort to collect their copious output of honey could end in death.
The result? An Agriculture Department study says the Africanized bee could cause economic losses of $58 million a year to U.S. beekeepers. The effect on farmers is harder to calculate, but pollination by domestic bees now adds an estimated $800 million to the value of American farmers' crops annually.
Cold winters will halt the bees' northward migration somewhere, perhaps in Virginia. But much damage will have been done. All because, more than 35 years ago, someone figuratively picked up a honeybee and found it connected to a couple of continents.
by CNB