Killer Bees

By Tim Vaughan

I lived in South Africa for 9 years where I worked in agriculture. South Africa is very advanced agriculturally, and exports large quantities of fruits every year. There are two main types of bees in South Africa which are used for pollination, the Cape bee Apis mellifera capensis and Apis mellifera scutellata, the so called Killer bee. In the area that I lived, we used the Killer, or "scuts" for pollination, at that was the native bee to the Northern Cape where I worked. I had a few hives of my own, and I managed 40 hives for the company I worked for. Internationally, the letters "AHB" or Africanized Honey Bee are used to describe this bee.

The AHB are much more aggressive than bees commonly found in the US, but there is a huge range of behavioral patterns between hives. Most bee breeders believe that aggressiveness in accumulative, in other words, more than one gene is responsible for aggressive behavior. Added to this is the fact that the queen, who produces all the offspring for the hive, mates with several, up to 20, different males, or Drones during her one and only mating flight. So bee colonies almost always are composed of half sisters, or as we say, "castes". This means that certain of the bees in a given hive may be more aggressive than others.

By the same token, European types of bees can also exhibit aggressive behavior. I have personally had bees in Santa Maria in the late 1980's that were much more aggressive than some of the hives I had in Africa. So in the long term, the introduction of the AHB is not going to bring down civilization as we know it, we will just have to work hard breeding them for gentleness. But in the mean time they can be dangerous, so be on your guard when a swarm comes calling.

Identifying AHB's can be difficult, they don't really look different to most of the bees found in the Southern and Western USA. They are typically darkish yellow like many Italian bees. The current method used by the State is mitochondrial DNA, which in my opinion is a great mistake. Long time beekeepers know that the first generation cross between types of bees are often aggressive, and since this type of DNA can only tell the female ancestry of the bees, the tests could, and often do, come back negative. There is a better way, called morphometrics, where the different angles of the veins in a bee's wings can be measured to determine what any individual hive's pedigree is composed of. With advances in technology, one could take a sample of bee's wings from a hive, and computers can do the rest. Many Universities and Beekeeping organizations are working on these methods now.

The AHB pollinates well, produces reasonable amounts of honey, and in some countries actually does better than European lines of bees. They resist pests and disease much better than the bees we are used to, and this helps explain in part their rapid advance into the US. The great die-off of our feral bees left a biological vacuum for the AHB. The biggest disadvantage is their aggressiveness which will take time to modify. A healthy population of European bees in San Luis Obispo will go a long way to make sure the impact of the AHB is minimal. Hobbyist beekeepers, even if they have only a few hives, can help tremendously.Any feral swarms that show any signs at all of aggressive behavior should be destroyed immediately, as drones from these hives can mate with the queens of managed and gentle hives producing very aggressive bees.

Honey

Index