Killer Bees Make Slow Migration To The North

The stories sound like the stuff of B movies. The latest: An elderly Las Vegas woman is rushed to a hospital after being ambushed by killer bees and stung 500 times.

At times the victim of misinformation and myth, the Africanized honeybee - which escaped captivity in Brazil in 1956 - is on a slow march north. The bees don’t hunt down humans but are more easily provoked and more likely to sting than their European brethren, which dominate in the United States. They’ve been found in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, California and Nevada.

So should those of us farther north brace for a deadly swarm?

Northern winters are likely to halt the Africanized bees, said Jerry Cochran, an entomologist, amateur beekeeper and agricultural program coordinator for the Colorado Department of Agriculture.

Bees die if their body temperatures drop below 50 degrees, Cochran said. Bees in cold-weather U.S. states cluster in colonies of at least 10,000 to keep warm in the winter. The bees take turns manning the cold perimeter and huddling in the warm center.

But at least so far, Africanized bees haven’t grasped the cluster concept, Cochran said.

“They’re a warm-weather bee in Africa, and they just don’t have this trait in them,” he said. “The hybrid bees don’t either.”

Gloria DeGrandi-Hoffman of the U.S. Department of Agriculture bee research center in Phoenix said scientists will learn more about the bees’ reaction to colder weather as they continue to move slowly north. She warned against assuming the bees won’t adapt.

“I don’t think there’s anyone who can say, ‘Yes, they will come,’ or, ‘No, they won’t come,”’ she said.

No honey bee is native to the Western Hemisphere. European bees were introduced in the 1600s. American Indians called the new insects “white man’s flies.”

A Brazilian geneticist imported bees from Africa in 1956. Some of the African bees escaped captivity and bred with existing bees.

This sidebar appeared with the story: THE BUZZ Killer facts

Deaths: an estimated 1,000

Entered U.S.: Hidalgo, Texas, 1990. Reached Nevada in 1998.