Killer Bees

On August 12, 2007 my husband Ron walkd out to our trailer which we now use for storage. He was stopped dead in his tracks about 30 feet from the trailer by a very loud humming noise. Hovering above the trailer was a black cloud. He looked at the trailer which is 31 feet long and all of the windows were covered in bees. He backed up and came back to the house. The house is located approximately 120 feet from the trailer.

We were going to wait 24 hours because we knew that sometimes bees make a stop and then move on the next day. Later on that evening we were outside in the front of our home and the scrub bushes and mesquite trees were buzzing. It sounded like a huge wall of constant humming moving toward us. I told Ron we needed to get into the house...now. I had images of our home being engulfed in bees. Since we live in Arizona I knew these were not garden honey bees. A swarm that large terrified me. The swarm moved in unison straight for our trailer congregating above it before landing and finding every crack to go inside.

Monday morning I called the Killer Bee Guy. I explained our situation to him over the phone. He met me at the end of our road within an hour. We made our introductions and drove to the trailer. The bees were crawling and swarming the trailer inside and out. He told me that we had a lot of bees and to go up to the house and he would suit up. He put on a white jumpsuit, gloves and a hood. He walked around the trailer a few times and then went inside. When he was finished he came up to the house.

He told me it was a good thing that we did not try to disturb the bees. They had already built a hive and they had only been there 24 hours. He said that the queen sends out about 30 bees and if they do not come back she does not send anymore to the same location. If they come back she will send about 30,000 and in a 24 hour period there can be over 100,000 bees. Which is what had occurred in our situation.

They were Africanized honey bees (killer bees). He tried to take them with him for his hives but he said that they were too aggressive so they had to be killed. Many of the bees escaped when the bombs went off. There were still thousand laying in pools under the trailer the next day. There were hundreds still swarming the trailer so I could not go inside. They had mainly moved to a nearby mesquite tree blocking our main gate to the property.

I tried to walk my dogs on Tuesday but for three days the bees remained highly aggitated. They had moved up to the house making it difficult to go in or out. The bees were on my dogs as soon as we went outside. I cut up some white T-shirts and put them on all four of my dogs. Bees have a hard time seeing white. I made sure I had no fragrances from soap or deoderant. The white T-shirts worked for the dogs but kept swarming around my face. I got stung on the back of the neck. Killer bees will attack the face and eyes as well as anything black in color. One of my dogs is black and small so I did not think he would survive a bee attack.

Africanized honey bees arrived in Arizona in 1993. They are a hybrid of European and Africain honey bees which were an experiment gone terribly wrong in Brazil. Honey bees are not indiginous to the Americas. From what I have read 26 African queen bees were accidentally let loose in Brazil. Brazil was trying to produce a bee that would withstand the heat better. They mated with the European honey bee and spread very quickly.

Some of the consistant observations are:

Africanized honey bees are not particular on where they colonize, they will set up a hive in a hole in the ground, in a soda can, on the side of your home, in a wood pile.
They swarm more than 30 times a year. This means they divide the colony, usually due to a new queen bee being born.
The queen lays between 1500 and 2500 eggs a day
They can be very aggressive when a threat is perceived
They can chase a threat up to 1 1/4 miles
They are moving north through the United States and have arrived in Utah. It is not known whether they can survive the colder climates.
Africanized honey bees a difficult for the beekeepers and farmers to control. I assume that this means they do not come back to the box hives to make honey. They go off and start their own colony where they want.

I am sure this is not the last time we will encounter killer bees. I am told we live in the heart of killer bee country and that there are no European honey bees in this area anymore. There are more and less aggressive Africanized bees.