Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 3, 1991 TAG: 9103030075
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH LENGTH: Medium
"They're aggressive and hypersensitive, but `killer' is a name that they do not deserve," said Rodriguez, a retired veterinarian and fourth-generation beekeeper who keeps 10 hives for research.
Rodriguez, a former U.S. Department of Agriculture supervisor for poultry inspection on the Eastern Shore, has written a book "to put people's minds at ease to not be afraid of bees." The 268-page manuscript, which he hopes will be published this spring, is called "Why Killer Bees."
"It's without a question mark," he said of the title. "I'm saying why they're not instead of why they are."
The bees - Rodriguez calls them Africanized honeybees - arrived in Brazil from Africa 35 years ago as an experiment to improve honey production in the South American country. In that respect, the research was successful.
But some of the imported bees escaped into the Amazon jungle and began breeding with local honeybees. Rodriguez said the hybrid strain maintained the highly aggressive trait of the African bees and began moving north.
Last year, some of the African bees were found in the southern United States, said Rick Fell, an associate professor of entomology at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg.
There are documented cases of the bees causing stinging deaths of people in Latin America, Fell and Rodriguez said.
But Rodriguez said he is concerned that publicity emphasizing those deaths will cause people to panic and start destroying any beehive they find. It's impossible to look at a bee or its hive and tell whether it's a domestic type or one of the African bees, he said.
The African bee's sting is no worse than any other bee's sting, Rodriguez said. "The risk is that they are highly aggressive, so more of the bees are likely to sting" if disturbed, he said.
The bee industry is big business. The estimated annual value of pollinated crops in the United States is $9.7 billion, Rodriguez said.
"The honeybee is far too important to mankind to call them `killer' bees," he said.
But Fell said the migration of the new bees to the United States will change the nature of this country's beekeeping industry "in the sense that a hive in the backyard won't be ignored as a cause for concern anymore."
The African bees are considerably more feisty that the docile honeybees people are accustomed to seeing, he said. Disturbing a domestic hive might bring out a dozen or so defenders, he said, whereas disturbing a "killer" beehive could bring a swarm of a hundred or more angry, stinging defenders.
"We really don't know exactly to what extent they're going to cause a problem in this country," Fell said. "But we can't just leave them alone and say there's no problem. . . . There's an increased likelihood of chance encounters and people getting stung."
Both experts agreed that efforts to stop the northward migration of the African bees are probably futile.
"Their ability to travel is enormous," Rodiguez said. "My feeling is that more swarms will be coming into the country and, by mating with our bees, they will become hybrid and established in northern latitudes. But people shouldn't be that scared."
by CNB