KILLER BEES IN SANTA ANA!

Tens of thousands of bees that swept through a Santa Ana neighborhood last week, stinging 13 people and two dogs, both of them fatally, have been identified as Africanized honeybees, Orange County officials said Tuesday. (From today's LA Times)

A brief history of the Killer Bee
As well as having the best footballers and female impersonators, Brazil also boasts the world's most foul-tempered and aggressive bees. And these "killer" bees are a man-made problem. The South American bee was crossed with the African bee, the idea being to create a more "resistant" bee, a hardy all-weather insect. What actually resulted was a psychopathically violent and anti-social creature, a real Chelsea nutter of a bee.

Killer bees were invented in Sao Paulo in 1956, by mad bee scientists, but soon escaped from the laboratory and colonized large parts of central and south America. Every year they got a bit further north. In 1990 they reached Texas, crossing the border on false passports, but it wasn't until 1993 that they notched up their first redneck. Eleven months later they bagged Texan number two, a ninety-eight year old man, who wasn't very sprightly and had difficulty running away. It seems a bit unfair that he survived all the upheavals of the 20th century only to be stung to death by deranged insects in his ninety-eighth year. In 1998 the bees were accused of killing a dog near Las Vegas.

US schools have now incorporated "Africanized Honey Bees" into their Life Science exam. (They call them Africanized Honey Bees because they are opposed to bee racism, and feel it is unfair to stigmatize one group of bees as killers simply because they are African. In their view it is wrong to imply that the bee crime rate is higher in one group of bees than in another.) Questions include:

Describe a beeless earth.

How is bee society like human society?

Is increased honey production worth the risk of importing potentially dangerous insects?

I suppose the answer to that last one depends how much you like honey and how much you like Texans. I personally believe that it is a price worth paying. Since 1956 Brazil has gone from 27th to 4th in the world for honey production. They have their detractors, but Brazil's bees have outperformed the rest of the Brazilian economy. And you've got to admit, the idea of Texans getting stung to f*** by swarms of insects is pretty funny, the occasional fatality notwithstanding.

Hats off, then, to the killer bees.
- posted by Harry Hutton @ 7:47 pm (0) comments