Sunday, July 30, 1989
PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER MAGAZINE

Bee Prepared

Our van shakes and shudders down the steep, rocky canyon of Cerro Gordo, along a nearly five-mile dirt path never intended for anything but feet. To our left looms the shadow of a forest, one of the last deciduous forests left in Latin America. The van’s wheels scrape the carcass of a cow, stripped of all its flesh and sprawled against the path. As the van lurches to a stop, Chip Taylor, the scientist in the front seat, warns us to stay far from the thorny acacia tree and its symbiotic red ant. But the bites of the fierce acacia ants are like babies’ teeth compared to what awaits us just 100 yards away.

Once fodder for bad jokes, supermarket tabloids and Grade B horror movies, the so-called killer bees are now practically buzzing at America’s doorstep. They are the descendants of African bees that escaped in 1957 from a scientific research project in Rio Carlo, Brazil—or so the official story goes. Most biologists question that version of events, but virtually no one disputes the fact that this is yet another case of science gone awry.

There are now an estimated 200 million swarms of the bees in Central and South America, moving steadily northward at 300 miles a year. In 1986, they arrived in Mexico and migrated north so quickly that by October of last year they had broken through the “biological barrier” erected by the Mexican and U.S. governments. Now roughly 350 miles south of Texas, the bees are projected to land in Brownsville next March. There is no way to stop them; no scientist worth his petri dish contends otherwise. Even the once-optimistic U.S. Department of Agriculture has given up all talk of stopping the bees. Taylor has been telling them all along that they didn’t have a chance.

“The bees must feel right at home in this kind of place,” mutters Glenn Hall, a bee geneticist from the University of Florida and a colleague of Taylor’s, as he zips himself into a protective suit more fitting an asbestos worker than a scientist. “It’s just like Africa.”

Moments later, as Hall, Taylor and a small band of American journalists thread their way among the 45 colonies of the apiary, the air turns thick with frenzied, angry bees on the attack. There are hundreds, no, thousands of them, and the noise is deafening. It has been described as the roar of a small plane engine, and that’s accurate—with one important codicil. The plane is flying at ear level.

Though just yards apart, the scientists are shouting to make themselves heard over the buzzing. Bees are attacking the photographer’s camera lens in such thick numbers that he is unable to focus. When I sweep my hands through the air, I feel bees bumping up against my heavy leather-and-canvas gloves. Bees are bombarding my eyes, nose, mouth. Hours later, after we have left the apiary several miles behind and I am finally able to remove my veil, I count more than 200 stingers in the seams. But for now, there is no relief from the bees, the noise and the tropical heat.

Taylor is hunched over an opened hive box, scanning a frame for the queen bee. “This is a modest attack, a six on a scale of 10,” he says, looking up from behind a black cloud of bees. Just then, Jose Antonio Guterrez Martinez, a University of Mexico graduate student, locates the queen in Box 43. It is unmarked by the scientists, therefore a new queen, the hive’s fourth in a year. Incredibly, Guterrez begins to remove one glove. He needs some dexterity to paint a dab of orange model paint on the queen’s back. But he hardly has the glove off before 20 bees have plunged their stingers in. “It’s quite bad, Chip,” he moans, doubling over in pain. “Get him out of here,” Taylor yells over the buzz.

It was only a year ago, shortly before the arrival of the African bees in northern Mexico, that Taylor distributed 180 colonies of gentle European bees throughout six apiaries along the eastern coast of Mexico, from sea level at Veracruz to an altitude of 5,250 feet slightly north of Jalapa. His intent was to record the change in behavior and genetics as African bees infiltrated the region. The rapidity of that change has been “genetically incredible,” according to Taylor and Hall. Today, the bees in the Cerro Gordo apiary show all the behavior —including the frenzied temperament—endemic to African bees.

Even among European honeybees, there are numerous strains. The most popular among U.S. beekeepers is the Italian, identified by the dusky-brown-to-bright-yellow band on its abdomen. Considered by many to be the prettiest of all bees, it is an excellent honey producer and as predictable as any bee ever gets. Sue Hubbell, author of the recently published A Book of Bees, characterizes it as having an “exuberant, sunny Mediterranean disposition.” Hubbell writes that another strain, the Caucasian, is “a bit conservative.” By that, she means that the bees hold back on honey production and reproduction until the weather is stable.

Then there are the African bees, whose aggressive qualities are thought to have evolved as a response to tropical predators, including man. In Africa, killer bees are managed for honey but considered too dangerous to farmworkers to be used to pollinate crops.

Of course, no self-respecting scientist would be caught using the “K” word. So what, then, should one call these “little bastards,” as even the most proper entomologist has been known to call them? Are they, as USDA scientists say, hybrid or “Africanized,” after 30 years of crossbreeding with their more docile European cousins? Or are they, as Chip Taylor contends, almost “pure African,” genetically indistinguishable from any strain in South Africa, their native home?

Certainly, enough deaths have been reported to justify the name “killer.” Though its individual sting is no worse than that of a European bee, an African bee is far more aggressive in defending nests and territory, attacking longer and in greater numbers. Unprovoked, the Africans do not sting. But it doesn’t take much to provoke them. In a 1980 experiment, scientists dangled a black flag in front of European and African bee hives. The African bees responded nearly five times faster than the Europeans and inflicted on the flag 85 stings in 30 seconds, compared with 10 by the European bees. More to the point, conservative estimates attribute 750 to 1,000 deaths in Latin America to African bee attacks during the last 30 years. Many of the victims had been stung thousands of times.

There is no evidence to suggest that all the years of interbreeding have tempered the bees’ nasty disposition in the slightest. And there is evidence that Africanized bees do not survive in the wild—which is why Taylor’s work has become so important. It seems that the Africanized bees swarm out of apiaries like the one in Cerro Gordo only to go off and die, while the pure African bees continue to head our way. This scenario, Taylor’s theory, throws a monkey wrench into the USDA’s $6 million cooperative program with the Mexican government, which has been trying to slow the bees’ northward migration by intercepting them with colonies of gentler European bees—the biological barricade. The idea is that the African genes will be diluted. But now even the Mexican government has apparently decided that this is wishful thinking, and is practicing a policy of learning to live with the killer bees.

In his usual low-key manner, Taylor, an entomologist at the University of Kansas at Lawrence, predicts what will happen once the bees take up residence in the United States: “There aren’t going to be a lot of incidents, but the incidents there are will be spectacular.”

In one such incident last March, a Minnesota man drowned during an attack by a swarm of African bees in a lake off the Panama Canal. Gary Hauser, an athletics director at a U.S. Defense Department school in Panama City, was fishing with two companions when their boat was suddenly swarming with bees. The men tried to swim to shore, but the bees kept stinging them on their faces, backs and arms. Hauser, a 42-year-old in top physical condition, never made it. A Defense Department spokesman said the stings were so numerous that the man swelled up and couldn’t breathe.

Scientists project that once African bees become established in the United States, they could account for up to 100 deaths a year, compared with the 40 now reported.

There have already been several occasions in which African bees landed in this country. The most notable occurred in 1985, when a swarm of African bees was carried to a small farming community near Bakersfield on some oil-drilling equipment apparently brought by a Venezuelan tanker. By the time the bees were finally discovered in a burrow near Lost Hills, they had been in California for six months and emitted a dozen swarms. It cost the state $1 million to track down and eradicate all the swarms, under the eaves of houses, in hollow trees. The original discovery was purely by chance. The driver of a bulldozer apparently set off enough of a vibration with his machine to disturb the ensconced bees. As he watched in horror, the swarm attacked a rabbit and then his glassed-in, air- conditioned cab, covering it so completely that he couldn’t see out. Afraid people would brand him a loony, the driver held off reporting his find until after several days’ nagging by his wife.

Even worse than the threat to humans is the one to agriculture. No single insect directly benefits mankind as much as Apis mellifera, the honeybee, which provides U.S. beekeepers with $200 million annually in honey production and is responsible for pollinating $20 billion worth of fruit trees and other cash crops each year, from the almond trees of California to the blueberry bushes of New Jersey. Every spring, commercial beekeepers load huge flatbed trucks with hundreds of pallets jam-packed with honeybees and transport them thousands of miles to add to the pollinating forces of the native bees. How is one to do that with African bees, which take insult at the slightest vibration?

Sitting in the 132-year-old main square of Veracruz, surrounded by balloon vendors and strolling musicians, Taylor is drinking beer and making small talk, recommending souvenir choices, such as the pure vanilla extract for which this region is famous. Hundreds of birds are swooping over the port city’s buildings into the almond trees of the Plaza de la Constitucion. Taylor, always the biologist, analyzes their flight path. And then he sees the bees. Attracted to the ever-present pheromone, or artificial bee scent, in his pocket, a couple of them are starting to buzz around the table.

“See how fast they zigzag,” Taylor says. “They’re hard to follow with your eyes, they move so fast. That’s one of the things that’s really been oppressive about all this. You go to a place that’s never seen African bees before and suddenly they’re everywhere.”

With his ruddy face, salt-and-pepper beard, and safari vest slung over a gray T-shirt dominated by a huge anatomical diagram of a honeybee, Taylor, 51, looks like a jungle explorer. He definitely has a flair for the dramatic. For his undergraduate course on honeybee biology, he organizes an annual feast to which every student is required to bring an edible bee product. His own regular contribution is drone larvae, sauteed with a little garlic.

Taylor enjoys publicity and knows how to use it. Last year he gave 60 telephone interviews to newspaper and magazine reporters, spending an average of an hour with each. Sometimes, he seems attracted to TV cameras the way African bees are drawn to the tiny neglected cracks between our skin and the bee suits. In several television appearances, he deplored public ignorance of the problem, each time using the same anecdote: “Most people have never heard of African bees and when they hear the term ‘killer bees,’ I’m afraid they think of the Saturday Night Live sequence with John Belushi coming out and screaming, ‘Your pollen or your wife!’ ”It’s a good line and it works every time.

Taylor’s research and projections on the migration of African bees are the most widely cited in the field. For years, he has set forth the theory that the migrating bees are almost pure African. Now he says he has proof: genetic studies by Deborah Smith at the University of Michigan and Glenn Hall at the University of Florida in Gainesville. “Our data has completely blown away their whole program here in Mexico. They’re operating on the premise that these two races are compatible, that all genetic combinations form in apiaries and all survive in the wild.

“It turns out there’s good evidence that the bees that become Africanized don’t survive significantly in the wild.”

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Copyright 1989 Philadelphia Inquirer