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Published Sunday, January 29, 2006
Testy Bees Add to Florida's Worries
Potentially fatal Africanized bees are here to
stay, experts say.
By ROBERT P. KING
The Palm Beach Post
WEST PALM BEACH -- As if hurricanes, roaches, sea lice and insurance bills
weren't bad enough, Floridians can add a new menace to their list of
worries: Killer bees are here.
And they're going to change your life. After decades of hype and cheesy
disaster movies, Africanized honeybees have established a foothold in
Florida, bringing a hair-trigger temper that makes them a threat to farm
workers, landscapers, meter readers, firefighters and basically everyone who
ventures outdoors.
In St. Lucie County, thousands of bees nesting below ground near water
meters swarmed onto unlucky utility workers late last year, though not
fatally. Separate attacks killed two dogs near Miami and Sarasota, along
with a horse near LaBelle west of Lake Okeechobee.
Africanized bee colonies have turned up in ports throughout the state,
including Fort Pierce and the Port of Palm Beach, and have been suspected at
tourist attractions such as Busch Gardens and Downtown Disney. Nobody knows
how to stop them.
So Floridians will just have to adapt just as they've learned to nail
plywood before hurricanes and scan lawns for fire ant mounds. That means
residents should "bee-proof" their homes, sealing any openings that could
allow the insects to turn attics and walls into killer-bee condos, experts
say.
People also should look out before starting lawn mowers, whose noise can
provoke the bees, or opening potential nesting sites such as sheds and
barbecue grills.
Those are already realities from Texas to California, where the bees showed
up in the 1990s after a decades-long march from Brazil to Mexico. California
firefighters receive training in rescuing bee victims, while Arizona
educators have drawn up bee lesson plans for children as young as
kindergarten age. (One tip for handling a bee attack: "RUN! RUN! RUN!")
But experts say the bees are just one more potential hazard in a state
teeming with them. They say people are more likely to be struck by lightning
than killed by bees.
"We live in a state that has fire ants that actually kill people," said
Jerry Hayes, assistant chief of apiary inspection for the Florida
Agriculture Department, which is including bee brochures in its display at
the South Florida Fair. "We have scorpions and spiders and boa constrictors
and all those scary things."
David Barnes, a bee technician for the department, said he already has had
to placate panicked callers, including a landscaper's wife.
So far, the Africanized bees haven't killed anyone in Florida, the
department says. They have killed roughly 1,000 people in the Americas,
including at least 14 in the United States, since the bees' ancestors
escaped from a Brazilian lab in 1957.
Unlike Hollywood's fictional killer bees, the real-life ones don't roam the
countryside looking for people to kill. They're slightly smaller and no more
venomous than the docile European strains prized by beekeepers.
But what the Africanized bees lack in size, they make up with a severe lack
of anger management. All honeybees defend their hives, but the Africanized
bees erupt against disturbances that European bees might shrug off -- a
noisy leaf-blower or nosy dog, for example. And they attack in much greater
numbers.
"People end up with 300, 400, a thousand stings," said Bob van der Herchen,
who runs a bee removal service in Englewood, south of Sarasota. Five hundred
stings might be enough to kill a child, federal experts say.
Hayes said the deaths that have occurred "have been horrific," noting that
the bees' favorite stinging targets include the nostrils and the mouth.
Once angered, the Africanized bees stay agitated for as long as 24 hours,
posing a continuing hazard, Barnes said.
In September, a swarm of Africanized bees trapped three residents in their
Miami Gardens home and attacked several firefighters, three dogs and two
television journalists after someone tried to move the log where the bees
were living, The Miami Herald reported at the time. One dog died.
Near LaBelle in Hendry County, Imogene Risner said her niece was washing a
horse near their home last year when a cloud of bees attacked, besieging the
animal's head and face. The horse died that night after suffering about
2,000 stings, she said.
Bee removal expert Ronnie Sharpton, owner of Palm City based Alpine Farms,
said not all mass bee attacks involve Africanized bees.
"The only time we run into aggressive bees is when someone else has been
aggravating bees by throwing rocks or spraying them," he said. He urged
people to leave all bees alone and let professionals handle them.
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