# Africanized bees



## james dilley (Mar 21, 2004)

The Africanized honey bee is now confirmed in La. Up near the Ar. state line North on Shreveport La. About 35 miles was the confirmed sighting and capture of the swarm(s) ,I wonder what the Bee keepers up that way are going to do.As here in Texas they put quarintines in effect..


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## james dilley (Mar 21, 2004)

After 15 years in the United States the AHB has interbred with the european stocks several times as well as there migration from Brazil. I think that they will over winter as . They continue North and inter breed with the native stocks, They are withstanding freezes that last for days or even weeks. As we down here in Texas understand it they are moving North at about 50 miles a year. Thats a lot of Daughter Queens from the swarms to boot. Its just a matter of time before they are in the north. But the Bee labs are experimenting with the AHB that they capture.To see what percentage they are .There is A indication with the more breeding with the european stocks we have the more docile they will become. Also remember that there has only been 11 deaths from AHB in Texas In 15 years. The key is public awareness and education.


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## Becca65 (Jul 13, 2005)

james dilley said:


> The Africanized honey bee is now confirmed in La. Up near the Ar. state line North on Shreveport La. About 35 miles was the confirmed sighting and capture of the swarm(s) ,I wonder what the Bee keepers up that way are going to do.As here in Texas they put quarintines in effect..


Are they aggressive? or do they need to be provoked?


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## Oxankle (Jun 20, 2003)

Does a bear have a fuzzy tail? 

Yes, they are very aggressive and will attack while you are still yards from their colony. Then they will follow you as much as a quarter mile. Where an European bee colony might send out 50 or 100 guard bees to do battle with you the Africanized bee will send out thousands. 

I do not place much stock in the theory that they will interbreed with our domestic bees and so "water down" their aggressiveness. Research has shown that when African queens have mated in the wild with both European and African drones (and queens mate several times before beginnng to lay) the African queen will selectively use African semen before using the European. They may in time become less aggressive, but it will not be in our lifetimes. 

I have also read that African colonies will begin to build queen cells almost immediately if deprived of a queen. This makes them difficult to requeen as the new queen must be in place immediately after the old queen is removed. Further, the African colonies sometimes have more than one queen. 

They are now less than 50 miles from my bees. I am not certain how much longer I will keep bees. I see no pleasure in having to suit up like an astronoaut to look at my bees. Neither do I need the liability that bees will entail when Africanized swarms are in the area.
Oxankle


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## Judy in IN (Nov 28, 2003)

Oxankle, 
I understand what you are saying. This is not a prospect that I look forward to, either. 

I think a lot of people stopped keeping bees when the varoa and tracheal mites showed up. It became too much of a hassle for them. I'm glad to read about new blood getting into beekeeping.

I find bees fascinating, myself, but don't want to take my life in my hands to work my hives. I'm hoping the cold weather here slows them down considerably.


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## Terri (May 10, 2002)

Ox, I don't know if this helps, but I have heard that in Africanized areas some beekeepers will requeen every year, even if the queen they have is a good one. 

This prevents an old queen from being superceded. They REALLY don't want a queen that has been mated to the local drones.


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## Oxankle (Jun 20, 2003)

Terri:
Annual requeening is not a bad practice anyway, for several reasons. However, some queens are unsatisfactory as shipped and the bees will begin supercedure as soon as they can. 

Even if the new queens are all good, all accepted and all established there is still nothing to keep killer bees from taking over a weak hive or establishing themselves in hollow trees or discarded equipment. A neighbor has a colony of bees in an old oil/water/gas separator in his pasture. Another has a colony in the gas tank of an old truck out behind his place. 

What I am trying to say is that once the killer bees are in the neighborhood there will be no way to distinguish a swarm of bees from your hives from a swarm of AHB. (And the politically correct are now insisting that we not use the term "killer bee" so as not to alarm the masses.)

Anyone who sees a swarm will (if prudent) assume it is a swarm of AHB. If a kid sneaks into my pasture to steal honey and is stung he will scream "killer bee". I will have to put on a full bee suit any time I am called to capture a swarm. Not pleasant. 
Ox


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## james dilley (Mar 21, 2004)

The A H B is calming down as it gos north I think its the influx of native/euro blood thats avalible for them to breed with. The only nice thing about the africanized is that they will build a lot of brood.So if a beekeeper in the area where they are present wants to increase his number of hives .He splits the A H B and then introduces new euro type queens.And from our experiances down here the bees are getting gentler as time goes on. The Bee lab in Weslaco Texas is conducting experiments to determine the rates of agressiveness in the mixed bees. And the africanized are getting hard to tell from europeans now due to the interbreeding. Used to be anyone saw a black colored bee would think AHB but not now as the Carnolian is black.


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## Qwispea (Jul 6, 2005)

The best advice might be to "Beecome educated". 

Then "bee prepared".


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## Becca65 (Jul 13, 2005)

Qwispea said:


> The best advice might be to "Beecome educated".
> 
> Then "bee prepared".


hah cute use of the word bee!! hi qwispea


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## marytx (Dec 4, 2002)

I saw a TV show about bees once (on PBS or Discovery, Learning channel or something like that) and they addressed the theory about the bees crossing. It seems that the Africanized queens emerge a day earlier than the European counterpart. Of course, the early bee gets the hive. I think that blows the theory about there being a gradual change to non-agressive bees. Yes, some may become a bit more gentle from crossing, but I think there will always be enough of a bias that there will be agressive bees to contend with until a natural solution is discovered.
Dale (DH of Mary, TX)


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## westbrook (May 10, 2002)

Inner breeding- the results are in....

Africanized honey bees are so called because it was assumed that the African honey bees spreading out from Brazil would interbreed with existing feral EHBs and create a hybridized, or Africanized, honey bee.

This has always been a major question for researchersâwhat, if any, type of interbreeding would happen between AHBs and EHBs and how would this affect honey bee traits that are important to people, such as swarming and absconding, manageability for beekeepers, honey production, and temper.

Many experts expected that the farther from a tropical climate AHBs spread, the more they would interbreed with EHBs. But it appears that interbreeding is a transient condition in the United States, according to ARS entomologist Gloria DeGrandi-Hoffman. She is research leader at the Carl Hayden Bee Research Center in Tucson, Arizona, and ARS national coordinator for AHB research.

Early on, we thought the mixing would reach a steady state of hybridization, because we knew the two groups of bees can easily interbreed and produce young,â DeGrandi-Hoffman says. âBut while substantial hybridization does occur when AHBs first move into areas with strong resident EHB populations, over time European traits tend to be lost.â

DeGrandi-Hoffman and Stan Schneider, a professor of biology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, have been collaborating the past 3 years to figure out why AHBs replace EHBs rather than commingling.

âWeâve found six biological and behavioral factors we think are responsible for making AHBs such successful invaders,â Schneider explains. First, AHB colonies have faster growth rates, which mean more swarms splitting off from a nest and eventually dominating the environment. Second is that hybrid worker bees have higher amounts of âfluctuating asymmetryââsmall, random differences between the left and right wingsâthan African honey bees have, even when raised in the same hive.

âImperfections like fluctuating asymmetry that increase with hybridization may end up reducing worker viability and colony survival,â says DeGrandi-Hoffman. âBut this is a controversial factor right now, and it will take long-term studies of African, hybrid, and European colonies in the same habitat to truly understand its influence.â

But the third factor is undeniably true: EHB queen bees mate disproportionately with African drones, resulting in rapid displacement of EHB genes in a colony. This happens because AHBs produce more drones per colony than EHBs, especially when queens are most likely to be mating, DeGrandi-Hoffman explains.

âWe also found that even when you inseminate a queen with a 50-50 mix of African drone semen and EHB semen, the queens preferentially use the African semen first to produce the next generation of workers and drones, sometimes at a ratio as high as 90 to 10,â she says. âWe donât know why this happens, but itâs probably one of the strongest factors in AHBs replacing EHBs.â

When an Africanized colony replaces its queen, she can have either African or European paternity. Virgin queens fathered by African drones emerge as much as a day earlier than European-patriline queens. This enables them to destroy rival queens that are still developing. African virgin queens are more successful fighters, too, which give them a significant advantage if they encounter other virgin queens in the colony. DeGrandi-Hoffman and Schneider also found that workers perform more bouts of vibration-generating body movements on African queens before they emerge and during fighting, which may give the queens some sort of survival advantage.

AHB swarms also practice ânest usurpation,â meaning they invade EHB colonies and replace resident queens with the swarmâs African queen. Nest usurpation causes loss of European matrilines as well as patrilines. âIn Arizona, weâve seen usurpation rates as high as 20 to 30 percent,â says DeGrandi-Hoffman.

Finally, some African traits are genetically dominant, such as queen behavior, defensiveness, and some aspects of foraging behavior. This doesnât mean that EHB genes disappear, but rather that hybrid bees express more pure African traits. The persistence of some EHB genes is why the invading bees are still considered Africanized rather than African, regardless of trait expression, she points out.

A coincidence may have contributed greatly to an overwhelming takeover by AHBs in areas theyâve invaded. Just as AHBs began their spread throughout the Southwest, the U.S. feral honey bee population was heavily damaged by another alien invaderâthe deadly Varroa mite, an Asian honey bee parasite first found here in 1987. âVarroa mites emptied the ecological niche of feral honey bees just as AHBs arrived, âsays DeGrandi-Hoffman. âIf they hadnât been moving into a decimated environment, AHBs might not have replaced EHBs so quickly.â 

Source: USDA Agricultural Research/March 2004.
http://www.msstate.edu/Entomology/beenews/beenews0704.htm


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