Africanized bees menace Arizona

PHOENIX – A particularly aggressive strain of honeybee has been menacing parts of Arizona in recent weeks, with some people getting stung so many times that they’ve been hospitalized.

In the past week alone, an 84-year-old man from the Tucson area was stung more than 2,000 times in his backyard. Three dogs have been killed. And beekeepers report an increase in calls to remove hives and bee swarms.

Experts point to the Africanized honeybee, also known as the killer bee, which is a crossbreed between the European honeybee and the African honeybee, as the attacking bees, said Reed Booth, who runs a bee-removal business in Bisbee in southern Arizona.

The killer bee is the result of experiments in Brazil decades ago, and the insects migrated to the U.S. The bees are more prevalent in warm Southwestern states such as Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. If their hives are disrupted, they become especially aggressive.

In a normal year, bee season runs from mid-March through late October, but it often depends on the weather.

“I normally get five to 10 calls a day for bee removal, and now you’re getting 30 to 60 every day,” Booth said.

The Phoenix Fire Department has responded to 58 bee calls in the metropolitan area since the start of 2014, including 17 this year, Capt. Aaron Ernsberger said.

The bees are easily provoked, Booth said. They are constantly on guard for possible threats to the hive.

“They hate any movement, noise or vibration,” Booth said. “They hate everything.”

Booth said he has also witnessed a behavioral shift in the Africanized honeybee, with their aggressiveness going “through the roof.”

An 84-year-old Oro Valley man survived after being stung by more than 2,000 bees in his backyard. Booth said 500 stings are the equivalent of one rattlesnake bite.

In Arizona, signs along popular hiking trails warn about the dangers of bee hives. Spring training baseball games are sometimes disrupted by swarms of bees, and pets sometimes fall victim to the attacks.

A woman driving through the Phoenix suburb of Peoria this week was swarmed by bees that were disturbed by a landscaping crew. Her dog was killed. A swarm attacked a person in the Prescott area and killed two other dogs this week. A man in Valle Vista, a community 14 miles northeast of Kingman, was hospitalized this week after being stung between 500 and 1,000 times. Full containment of the site could take several days, fire officials said.

The sizes of the hives and swarms vary, but Booth said an average hive usually has 40,000 to 60,000 bees.