The MacNeil/Lehrer Report; Killer Bees

(Scene from "The Swarm",)

"SHERIFF": Yeah, I`ve got it right here in front of me. I`ll call you back.

"CITIZEN": The African bees that killed Paul`s mother and father are back! Get everyone inside and everything locked up!

"SHERIFF": You call the (unintelligible), I`m calling the school.

ROBERT MacNEIL: Don`t panic, this is only a movie. But there are killer bees, and they are -- slowly -- headed towards the United States.

(Continuation of movie scene.) (Sound of siren.)

"SHERIFF": Maureen, those killer bees are coming in. Get all the kids off the playground, into the building.

"WOMAN": Close your windows! Close your doors!

MacNEIL: Tonight, a look at the Africanized honeybees that are known as killers.

Good evening. When I first heard about killer bees, I thought it was a joke -- a scare dreamed up by horror movie makers or bored headline writers. But there are such things. They are Africanized honeybees, and they have some very unpleasant characteristics. They are coming north from Brazil, traveling some 200 to 300 miles a year. At that rate they could reach this country sometime abound 1990. But the so-called killer bees are already creating anxiety and some problems in this country. So tonight, what are these bees, how dangerous are they, and what`s being done about them?

The story begins in 1956, when an insect geneticist brought queen bees from Africa to Sao Paulo, Brazil, with the goal of increasing honey production through cross-breeding. The African bees gathered nectar over greater distances and worked longer hours than gentle European bees. But they were harder to manage; you might say they were bad-tempered. And they often flew away in a swarm. The hybrid bee did product more honey, but geneticists couldn`t get rid of the undesirable traits. Before their experiments could be completed, twenty-six African queen bees and their swarms escaped captivity and headed for the wilds of Brazil. That was in 1957.

Six years later the African bees had swarmed to Rio. By 1965 they-`-d ranged 2,000 miles further north, to Recife, Brazil. By now they`ve reached Venezuela, and they`ve covered an area larger than the continental United States. As they`ve moved north, headlines have reported killer bee attacks.

(Shots showing various headlines about killer bees.)

MacNEIL: Attacking African bees pursue victims over great distances. Once angered, the bees will continue their attack for many hours, and sometimes their stings do kill. African bees are easily disturbed; the closer they get to people the more problems they can cause. A typical colony numbers 40,000 bees. Here, on a branch of a tree in a Brazilian suburb, the bees pose a threat to people living nearby and to children whose school is only a few hundred feet away.

In Brazil and elsewhere in South America fire department squads have been trained to find and destroy potentially dangerous colonies of African bees. But the bees reproduce rapidly and abscond regularly, making the job difficult.

Even harder to fight than the African bee itself is its reputation as a killer. The experts wish the name "killer bee" would go away, but it seems firmly entrenched in our language and popular culture.

(Scene from "Saturday Night Live".)

"RADIO ANNOUNCER": We interrupt this program to bring you this bulletin from the newsroom. Swarms of South American killer bees have been spotten crossing the border into California. Sightings have mostly been confined to rural areas. None have yet been seen in the more heavily populated areas. Eyewitnesses say that the bees are yellow and black, dressed...

"KILLER BEE": Do as I say, Senor, or your wife dies!

"RADIO ANNOUNCER": ...much the way Eli Wallach did in the movie, `The Magnificent Seven`. The bees are also overweight...

"KILLER BEE": Turn that radio off!

"RADIO ANNOUNCER": ...they`re armed, and danger-

(Sinister laughter from "Killer Bee.")

"HUSBAND: Wait a minute! You must be the....

"KILLER BEE": That`s right, Gringo.

SECOND "KILLER BEE": The killer beesl

MacNEIL: It may be funny to some, but in 1971 the National Research Council in this country took it seriously enough to set up a committee to study the African honeybee.The committee`s report, published in 1972, stated in part: "Because of its unprovoked mass stinging, and because of frequent swarming and absconding, the Brazilian bee is dangerous to people an animals and is difficult to manage. It has already brought about drastic changes in the beekeeping industry in the areas it occupies in South America. The committee feels that it is essential to do whatever can b e done to minimize the likelihood of this bee moving into North America."

Just recently, about the time of the release of the movie, "The Swarm", a disaster film about killer bees, the U.S. Department of Agriculture produced a $20,000 film entitled "Killer Bees: Fact or Fantasy?" Here`s an excerpt from the film, featuring Dr. Orley Taylor, an entomologist from the University of Kansas who`s been studying the African bees in South America.

NARRATOR: Here in French Guiana, at the northern tip of South America, Dr. Taylor and his students are striving to obtain a working knowledge of the African honeybee.

Dr. ORLEY TAYLOR: If we can understand how the bees reproduce, what their natural enemies are and what sorts of problems they have out in the wild, then we perhaps can get some idea of where the bees might be vulnerable, we can get some idea of what to expect, how to warn people, how to minimize problems, and so on and so forth.

NARRATOR: Unlike the European honeybee common to the United States, the African has a tremendous ability to swarm, or reproduce. As we shall see, it is not the sensational re ports of the African`s killer instincts that has brought them to the forefront of the scientific community, but rather it is this incredible ability to reproduce.

TAYLOR: In the process of swarming, the bees produce these queen cells; and when the queen cells are well prepared, then the old queen goes off with a large number of the worker bees -- they usually settle in a tree someplace -- and this is familiar to most of us as a swarm. This swarm sends out scouts, and the scouts look for a new place to set up housekeeping, and if they find a new place then the swarm moves off and colonizes that cavity, wherever it might be. And this is how a new colony is started.

The African bees, we can get them going through three or four swarm cycles in one year, and each time they go through a swarm cycle they`ll produce two to three swarms in each cycle. So they`re producing anywhere from eight to twelve swarms in the course of a year, whereas the European bees would be producing generally only one.

But these bees seem to have the ability to have the swarms move ten, twenty, thirty miles. We`ve actually found swarms that have colonized islands off the coast of South America, twelve miles off the coast. They have landed on boats as much as perhaps fifteen miles off the coast of the mouth of the Amazon. Now, this is unheard of with European bees.

The other thing that seems to happen occasionally is that African swarms will land on European colonies of bees. They`ll sit there for a few hours; and then apparently they go in at night. The African queen takes over, starts laying all the eggs, and the colony becomes almost instantaneously Africanized.

NARRATOR: Research has revealed that there are times when the African honeybee displays no violent defensive behavior. During these periods of relative calm they can be handled safely, with little or no protection. Dr. Taylor`s research here has also begun to unravel the truth about their new- found reputations. Are the African honeybees really killers?

TAYLOR: There is some truth in the stories that people and animals have been killed by these bees. We have talked to many witnesses, to people who have been in some of these incidents, and I don`t think there`s any doubt that there is some truth to this. On the other hand, I think that these incidents basically are fairly rare, and they simply aren`t everyday occurrences, they don`t involve a large portion of the people in those countries; and most of them, it seems, can probably be avoided.

NARRATOR: To give us an idea of the African honeybee`s defensive behavior, Dr. Taylor is purposely disturbing this colony of 50,000 bees.

TAYLOR: When you first work with Africanized bees after hearing many stories about them, you become quite concerned for your personal safety. But you learn how to handle them and learn how to control them, and you learn how to minimize any danger to yourself or to anybody around you.

NARRATOR: The card he is holding is a common experiment used to measure bees` stinging response. Like most honeybees, the Africans prefer the dark spot. But the Africans` response is many times more intense than our own domestic honeybee.

TAYLOR: I`ve been in some circumstances where several hundreds of bees have come after me, and when I haven`t been well-protected I`ve had to retreat three or four hundred yards before you lose most of the bees. Very often you even have to seek shelter inside a house. They will persist in trying to attack for as much as an hour, maybe even two hours.

NARRATOR: When bees are alarmed they discharge a scent, or pheramone, into the air which signals danger. Research shows that the Africans` alarm system is far more developed than their European counterpart, common to the United States. In this sensitivity to alarm may lie a clue to the African honeybee`s volatile defensive behavior. pheramones are not only used as an alarm system; they also provide bees with a form of communication. In the reproductive swarm, pheramones are used to attract the swarm to a new home. Again, the pheramone -- or homing device -- is more pronounced in the African, and may explain their ability to swarm great distances.

By trying to mimic these attractant pheramones with chemicals, Dr. Taylor hopes to develop a technique for the effective management of wild African colonies.

The African honeybee swarms and absconds. How will we keep them in hives to provide honey? This bee displays a violent defensive behavior. How will colonies be trucked from orchard to orchard to pollinate crops? How will beekeepers preserve their livelihood when the African honeybee arrives in the United States?

TAYLOR: Even if these bees do get to the United States, beekeepers are not really going to have to deal with them. There are other ways in which to handle this problem. The easiest way is simply to requeen their colonies every year with European queens. And what`s involved here is simply taking out the old queen, killing her and putting in a good European queen, and in a matter of just a few weeks the worker bees of the colony will be from the new queen.

NARRATOR: If the requeening program is to be effective, pure European queens must be available in massive quantities. In this way, when an African hive is requeened with a European, the African traits will eventually be bred out of the colony completely.

TAYLOR: As we have seen, the threat of the Africanized honeybee has been largely overstated. Coexistence with these bees is the rule, and the number of stinging incidents are few. The real threat of these bees concerns their effect on beekeeping and on the pollinization of crops. Given that we have many years to study this situation, we should be well-prepared for these bees if they do arrive in the United States.

MacNEIL: The USDA film was made to allay public concern, for the bees` reputation as killers could have an adverse impact on beekeeping in this country. U.S. honeybees help pollinate over six billion dollars` worth of crops each year. Any change in their characteristics could significantly affect American agriculture.

John Root is Vice President and General Manager of the A.I. Root Company. A.I. Root publishes books and magazines on bees and manufactures beekeeping supplies. Mr. Root, how has all this fuss about so-called "kill er bees" affected your industry, the beekeeping industry, so far?

JOHN ROOT: Probably the greatest effect it has had has been that it`s frightened the public. Bees certainly should be viewed with respect, but

they shouldn`t be frightening. And we always attend the Boy Scout jamboree, and boys used to walk up and they would bring the side of the observation hive and play with the bees as they came out of the hive. Now they step back and they say, "Are those killer bees?" So I would say basically the public has been quite frightened by it.

MacNEIL: So what are you doing in the industry to counteract these scare stories?

ROOT: Well, we have started a publicity campaign with our customers in order to try to get them to be perhaps better neighbors, especially in the urban areas. I`d classify our beekeepers in two classes, those who raise honey to produce income and those who keep bees as a hobby and an avocation. And we`ve tried to, by these pamphlets --well, having good neighbor relations is always difficult if you have children, pets, and bees. The bees certainly add an awful lot to it.

MacNEIL: But it`s gotten worse, has it, because people think that ordinary American or European-type bees may have the characteristics of the ones we`ve been watching.

ROOT: Yes. Everybody seems to think that they`re allergic to bee stings. There are cases of severe allergy to bees, but in most cases all you do is swell after you`ve had a bee sting; and people think after they have swollen like that that they`re allergic to them, and neighbors become very, very upset when someone starts beekeeping.

MacNEIL: What are you doing to meet your concern about what would happen to your industry if these Africanized bees did arrive here?

ROOT: I think probably the biggest effect would be that of the beekeeper rather than the public. You have a situation where you have a bee here that absconds; if a person is keeping his colonies to produce honey and all of a sudden he finds all of his bees gone, obviously he`s not going to produce a crop. The other thing is the irritability and the fact that beekeepers` would have to really requeen with bees that have been artificially inseminated to have the gentle characteristics that we want for our bees here in the United States.

MacNEIL: So it would be more desirable, from the point of view of your industry, to keep them out?

ROOT: Oh, definitely; definitely it would.

MacNEIL: Now, some of the beekeepers in Brazil, for instance, have given up because they just don`t like the new kind of bees; but others like them because they actually do produce more honey, and they`ve adjusted to them. Could our industry adjust to them, or would it require a lot of retraining and everything?

ROOT: Well, our beekeeping industry is different. Our Department of Agriculture and some of the private interests in the United States have produced very, very productive bees through artificial insemination. And I think this can be controlled quite well. The other characteristic of this African bee is the fact that they`re not able to cluster or protect themselves from the cold in the wintertime. And so they really would perish in the wintertime when the weather gets cold.

MacNEIL: Unless they stayed in the Deep South, or something.

ROOT: Right, right. But they move so quickly that they would tend to move north. And our breeding facilities are in the South, too.

MacNEIL: Okay; thank you. The man in charge of bee research for the U.S. Department of Agriculture is Dr. Marshall Levin. He is Deputy Assistant Administrator for Plant and Entomological Science. Dr. Levin has studied the-African honeybee firsthand in South America. He`s with us in Washington. Dr. Levin, what is the Department of Agriculture doing to prepare us for this potential invasion?

MARSHALL LEVIN: One of the things we`re trying our darndest to do is try to put it in proper perspective. And all through this program and all through other similar situations I keep hearing people say that these killer bees are coming to the United States and what are we going to do about it. But nobody ever wants to show the other side of that coin, which is that we have no idea at the present time that if and when these bees come to the United States they will give the same kind of problems that they have been giving in some of the countries that have received all this publicity. Now, this is one of the reasons why we`re supporting Dr. Taylor`s research, to try to find out in the next few years, as he has in the past few years, what happens as these strains of bees migrate through the countryside that they have to traverse on their way here. He`s been dealing with these bees in a fairly unpopulated area where they have retained -- or you might even say reverted almost completely back to -the pure African genotype. And we don`t think, based on what we have seen in Brazil, that they`ll continue to do that as they migrate through areas where there are higher populations of people, of resident populations of honeybees looked after by beekeepers. And we think that`s where the clue will come as to how much of a problem these bees might cause should they come here -- and I think we need to keep reminding people that even though they have been moving rapidly the last few years and even though we see nothing to stop them from continuing to spread rapidly in the next few years, we are seeing them go through a completely different environment that may have a very significant impact on the nature of these bees as they come through. And that`s what we`re waiting to see before we really come down on the side of knowing how alarmed we should get.

MacNEIL: I see. Could I summarize what you`re saying, that as they move north they might change and lose those virulent characteristics that we`ve been hearing about?

LEVIN: Exactly. With the help, of course, of man. We don`t think they`re apt to do this by themselves.

MacNEIL: (Laughs.) I see.

LEVIN:But we have the history of what went on in Brazil; in those parts of Brazil that were occupied by a fairly advanced beekeeping industry and, as was referred to earlier, where beekeepers constantly kept re moving the undesirable queens and replacing them with desirable ones, over the years this has had a very significant impact to a point where the beekeepers there and the general public as well are very happy with what they have. Another factor to consider is that the bees have been so successful in Brazil and South America because they are specifically adapted to that kind of climate. And Mr. Root referred to it slightly when he said that we don`t think these bees will do very well in the northern part of the country; and the history and experience have shown, as these bees migrate south into the temperate climate of Argentina they do not do as well as they did in the tropical climates and that the European type bees are able to cope and compete with them very well. So that the job for. the beekeeper is made a lot easier that way, and they cause considerably fewer problems with the general public.

MacNEIL: I see. Are you considering, in the department, any of the possible barrier-type things that the National Research Council report of a few years ago suggested, like quarantines or poison baits and sprays or anything, or haven`t you arrived at that point yet?

LEVIN: Well, we have of course implemented their suggestion to improve the quarantine. This was done some time ago by our regulatory arm in the department. We also, with the help of the industry, had a change in the law making it a little more difficult to accidentally or on purpose import undesirable germ plasm, which the African bee in its troublesome state would certainly be. And we are watching very carefully through the assistance of the operations of Dr. Taylor to learn more about this. Some of the other proposals that were made in the report and which have been made by the general public in hundreds of letters to us over the years present some ideas which would be rather extreme types of actions that might be taken if the need arose, but we feel that at this stage of the game we don`t need to really give too much serious consideration to some of the more extreme ways of keeping them back. The biological barrier is the concept that I think is most likely to be considered our mechanism for keeping them out, because this is basically what did the job in Brazil - converting them to acceptable bees -- and this is the policy that we have been promoting with some of the countries with whom we`ve been in contact in South America between where the bees are and here, trying to stimulate their interest and concern and trying to provide whatever guidance we can in getting them to do the best they can to provide what you might call a biological barrier, which is nothing but a resident population of well managed bees through which these bees will have to migrate and through which they will then be affected by the activities of man.

MacNEIL: Thank you. Dr. Levin is anxious to put it in perspective, and so are we -- or in context -- and we thought we were doing that on this program. Just to come back to this -- we have a minute or so left -- how much is all this media hype and media scare, and how much is this genuinely a problem, both for people and for the beekeeping industry and American agriculture?

ROOT: Well, there`s a lot of money to be made from the sensational part of it, and I think that most of the sensational part of it has been in order to make money. But this problem has been with us for more than twenty years and the beekeeping industry has been aware of it, but all of a sudden the American public is now aware of it because of the publicity and the moneymaking aspects of it, I think.

MacNEIL: I see. Does that make your job any easier, Dr. Levin, in getting the resources necessary to study the problem -- the fact the public is really sort of turned on to the subject now?

LEVIN: I have to be honest and say that it probably does, to some extent. But we are not really seeking very much in the way of resources now. We are trying to wait until we have a little better feel for what we`re going to need, if anything, at this time. We have great optimism that our problem and the problems the United States faces are going to be solved with or without our help, in South America...

MacNEIL: Well, we have to leave it there. Sorry to cut you in midsentence, but I get your point. Thank you very much, Dr. Levin; thank you, Mr. Root. We leave you tonight with the thought that if the killer bees are on schedule they moved about sixty feet closer during the course of this broadcast. That`s all for tonight. Jim Lehrer will be back to morrow night. I`m Robert MacNeil. Good night.