Sunday, July 30, 1989
PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER

Bee Prepared (continued)

Tracing the migrating bees’ mitochondrial DNA, passed only from mother to offspring, researchers Smith and Hall found an unbroken line all the way back to Africa. To scientists, the implications of this discovery were immediate and revelatory. It meant that while the African bees have crossbred with more than 500,000 colonies of European bees in the course of their 30-year migration, they have remained almost genetically unaltered. Though African drones continue to mate with European queens, their offspring are not part of the migrating force. The bees headed our way are not Africanized; they are African.

“So in a genetic sense,” says Taylor, somewhat reluctantly, “it really is a killer bee. It is displacing the European honeybee.”

Pure science is not the only factor behind Taylor’s problems with the USDA. He accuses Thomas E. Rinderer, research leader of the government laboratory in Baton Rouge, La., of operating an ineffectual program that is “very high on style and low on substance.”

“Tom’s basically a nice guy but sucked into a power trip with these bees. I have lot of sympathy for Tom. I imagine myself in his position. It’s a no-win position. It’s bigger than he is, bigger than his lab, bigger than the USDA. He doesn’t realize that, and that’s why I blame him. He should have adopted a management style that would have spread the glorious blame.”

Despite his contributions to an understanding of the biology of the African bee, Taylor has been without any financial support since last September. “There’s just no money for science in this country,” he says. “This is one of the biggest biological phenomena of the 20th century and I can’t get funding.” For years now, he has operated on a shoestring and estimates that he has already invested up to $30,000 of his own money on research. Now, he is preparing to pull out of the field altogether.

The killer bee issue has been political from the very beginning. Warwick Kerr, the Brazilian scientist responsible for bringing African bees to the New World, was a prominent liberal spokesman and humanitarian during one of the most oppressive military regimes in that country. His admirers—and there are many—contend that the junta sought to discredit him with the accusation that he had sabotaged Brazil by intentionally releasing the bees. In fact, Kerr, who studied genetics at Columbia University, was trying to create a new breed for Brazil’s northern tropics, where bees had never thrived.

Most accounts tell of a hapless scientist whose experimental bees escaped when a visiting researcher opened the wrong gate. A more likely scenario might read like this:

Kerr, a good scientist but a poor ecologist, propagated hundreds of queens from his 26 original African colonies, then sent them to friends and acquaintances with isolated apiaries in the Brazilian tropics. The male offspring of those queens would of necessity be pure African. Whether the resulting explosion of African hives was by design, accident or miscalculation no one wants to say, as almost every scientist in the United States who knows Kerr is extremely fond of the man.

As the bees approach the Texas border, the scientific infighting grows increasingly political and petty. Perhaps it is best exemplified by the division between Stephen Taber, a retired USDA researcher who did the first U.S.-based studies on African bees, and Rinderer, his former boss and nemesis, whom Taber angrily dismisses as “a very bad beekeeper.”

As pilot of the USDA program in Mexico, Rinderer argues that the migrating bee will wreak havoc on U.S. agriculture. A terrible honey producer, it will devastate the multimillion- dollar honey and beekeeping industry in this country, his theory runs. Its introduction into any kind of commercial setting could prove disastrous, he says.

But there is strong indication that African bees have already been deliberately introduced into the United States by commercial beekeepers.

Taber is part of a small but vocal minority of bee scientists who are spreading a far different word on the African bees than anything the USDA is putting out. According to this splinter group, African bees are hardier, more resistant to parasites that are already decimating colonies of European bees in Florida, California and 17 other states. In fact, they say, these much maligned insects are no worse than the 4 million colonies of European honeybees now peacefully buzzing away in America’s fields and back yards.

When Bill Clarke, a retired bee extension specialist at Penn State University, visited Costa Rica in September, he says that he worked the “killer bees” wearing the same minimal protective gear—a veil and gloves—that he uses in his own yard back home in Pennsylvania.

“These bees have a lot of benefits to U.S. beekeepers,” says Taber, who now breeds artificially inseminated queen bees in Vacaville. “It’s an excellent honey producer and the U.S. Department of Agriculture says it’s not. It’s also a very good pollinator; the USDA says it’s not. I quit the USDA because there were so many stupid idiots employed there.”

“The Africanized bee is the most mythologized insect that I know of,” Rinderer counters. “A lot has to do with them being superbees, and when you look at them they’re not. But somehow these concepts get into the common lore and get repeated. I’m sort of enamored by the scientific way, myself. How other people come to their conclusions, I don’t understand. Fortunately, I don’t have to defend it.”

But he is in the hot seat when come it comes to defending the USDA’s much-criticized program of genetic dilution in Mexico. Theoretically, he says, it should work. Whether it actually has he doesn’t know.

“The mathematics of the concept work,” says Rinderer. (Translation: a computer analysis supports his position.) “I don’t know if they’ve done the program in Mexico as it was recommended. And one of my thoughts—should somebody say it doesn’t work—is that I don’t know if their experience is a completely valid perspective about the concept itself. . . . But the general tone is one of optimism for that sort of a program.”

In other words, the USDA will continue doing the same thing once the bees arrive in Texas that it has been doing in Mexico.

Echoes Elba Quintero, U.S. director of the cooperative program: “In theory, on computer, it probably works. But when you get those ideas into situations that don’t take into account things like food availability . . . well, we looked into it and entertained the idea, but when we saw it was impossible we began looking into other methods.”

In Mexico, there are no screaming newspaper headlines about “killer bees.” They’re just plain old “African bees.” And in all of Mexico, only five people, all older men, have died in bee attacks. Compare that number, defies a media-weary Quintero, with the far greater numbers of human deaths from scorpion and snake bites.

Mexico’s better fortune than Brazil, where the African bees acquired the name “killer” with good reason, may be due to the Mexican people’s longstanding familiarity with bees. In some parts of the country, notably the Yucatan, it is the rare family that does not keep at least one backyard hive. Along with China, Mexico is the world’s leading exporter of honey, shipping out 60,000 tons a year.

And then there’s the fact that when the African bees first move into an area, they are not very defensive. New swarms have one priority, according to Taylor, and that is to survive. To do so, they must build up and stabilize their nests, cutting back on their defensive behavior.

But now many of Mexico’s beekeepers are noticing a change—and becoming increasingly critical of their government’s efforts at controlling the African bees. In Veracruz, agronomist Roberto Trijo started worrying about his bees in February. “Things are getting very bad,” he said through an interpreter a month later. “Yesterday, we went to the hives and couldn’t even harvest the honey. The stinging was so bad my workers couldn’t endure it.” Trijo was making plans to burn four of his hives.

As Elba Quintero says with a philosophical shrug, “If they’re going to be around, you might as well try to live with them. There is no way we are going to stop them. We have slowed them down as long as possible, so the scientists will have the chance to study them. But the bees are coming.”

One year ago, in a dusty field down the road from Jalapa, Taylor prepared to study the arrival of the bees at an apiary selected for its isolation from human contact. The bees have long since arrived. Now, just 75 feet away from the 30 colonies shaded in a grove of coffee and orange trees, a corrugated shack has been discovered and occupied by a family of squatters. The bees aren’t bad yet, but they will be, very soon. And in that family, there’s a little girl, maybe 4 years old, with big dark eyes and bare feet, who is altogether too curious.

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Copyright 1989 Philadelphia Inquirer