Bee Zaagar - Apiary and Beekeeping News

Killer bees make presence felt in Valley

By Jennifer C. Smith
The Monitor - EDINBURG, July 3, 2005 — Mike Quinn recalled sprinting more than 200 yards to escape thousands of Africanized honey bees in Rio Hondo a few years ago. “I was stung several times,” said the Texas Parks and Wildlife invertebrate biologist.

He’s lucky. An allergic person stung by a bee could have a fatal reaction, and even nonfatal stings re-quire two to three weeks of recovery, said Edinburg Fire Department Chief Shawn Snider. “We’ve seen people attacked by hundreds and thousands of them,” he said.

Weekly bee incidents involving the Africanized species have prompted several fire department and city health officials to advise bee attack prevention guidelines. The species often involved in attacks are crossbreds of the Africanized bee and the honey bee.

Africanized honey bees, commonly known as “killer bees,” have an aggressive nature; a hive can con-tain anywhere from 40,000 to 50,000 bees, Quinn said. “They have an attitude. They get upset more quickly and sting more quickly,” said Bob Cox, an ento-mologist at the Kiki de la Garza Subtropical Agricultural Resource Center in Weslaco.

Surveying an area before doing any loud or disruptive activity could prevent Africanized bee trouble, Snider said. “The citizen needs to be aware of their surroundings,” he said. “You need to have awareness in parks, yards and your streets in relation to bees.” The fire department responds to three to five bee attacks a week, he said.

Home infestations must be handled by pest control as soon as possible, Cox said. “You should be care-ful and not disturb them,” he said. “Call a pest control operator. Don’t try to control them at home.”

Dry weather and a lack of rainfall has increased bee congregation at sprinklers, swimming pools and other sources of moisture, he said. But “they’re not aggressive when they’re out foraging,” Cox said. “Aggressiveness (occurs) if only you approach within 10 feet of them or their colony.”

Africanized bees entered the United States through the city of Hidalgo in 1990, according to Texas A&M University’s Web site. “They’ve spread throughout the southwestern United States,” Quinn said. “They’re throughout most of Texas and we cannot put the genie back in the bottle.”

Bees can lodge anywhere: inside or outside a home, trees, even clotheslines and tall grass, Snider said. Unlike Africanized bees, honey bees are vital to agriculture, Snider said. “Honey bees in the Rio Grande Valley are just as important as rain,” he said. “Without their assistance through the pollination process, food crops would diminish tremendously.”

Honey bees, which look almost identical to the Africanized specimen, have been in the country since the 1620s, Cox said.

Bee happy

Paul Metcalf, 63, part-time lecturer in horticulture and beekeeping, Easton College, Norwich

Interview by Katie Shimmon
Tuesday July 5, 2005
The Guardian

I started at Easton College 30-odd years ago. In terms of horticulture, my area of work is plant and soil science, which I teach. In terms of beekeeping, I think up courses for the college to put on, provide the education for them and service them. I also run the college apiary, which has 30 colonies and is used for teaching. As a teaching apiary attached to a college, it's probably one of the best in the country.

We run three beekeeping courses: an introduction to beekeeping, which is a theoretical course on the basic principles of beekeeping and how honeybee colonies work. We also do a more advanced course that looks at the underlying science of beekeeping and how it applies to the practical situation. And we run a practical course during the summertime.

A couple of people assist me with the practical course. There's a limit to how many students you can deal with effectively at any one time. At the moment, we're running two evening classes on practical beekeeping - we've got 18 people on one and 12 on the other. They come from across the social strata: some might be termed academics; some are retired or close to retirement; but, more heartening, over the last three years, we have seen an increase of people aged 30 to 40. Most people in this country come into beekeeping as a hobby, but some work at it at weekends to supplement their income.

People who come on practical beekeeping courses have to accept they are going to get stung. Part of the skill of beekeeping is your ability to handle the bees and minimise the stings you get. We try to teach that, but you do have failures.

I run about 20 colonies of my own. My family won't have them at home so I have them on farms.

My guess is when I reach 65, the horticulture teaching will go, because I shall probably only be working to keep the taxman happy. But, if the college wishes me to, I would help to run the apiary. They want me to find someone to replace me when I depart.