Bee Threat May Force Spraying of Wide Area

Agriculture officials are counting on luck, some hard-nosed detective work and a little cooperation from a swarm of so-called killer honeybees to avoid spraying pesticide over 400 square miles of Central Valley land, state Director of Food and Agriculture Clare Berryhill said Saturday.

“If all else fails, we will have to go in and spray the area,” Berryhill told The Times. “This is mind-boggling. This is a hell of a serious problem.”

It will be several days until a final decision can be made about spraying the area 45 miles northwest of Bakersfield where a colony of the attacking Africanized bees was identified last Wednesday. There has been no decision about what pesticide might be used.

Matter of Identification

Bee scientists and agriculture officials first must determine a speedy way to separate domestic bees from the so-called killer variety, which are native to Africa and were first imported to South America in 1956. If the strains cannot be divided, Berryhill said, millions of domestic bees will have to be killed--a prospect that could cost the state more than $500,000 in compensation to worried beekeepers.

What could save the bees is an as-yet unproven method of telling domestic bees from the killer bees, a strain that is believed responsible for the deaths of thousands of animals and about 150 people in Central and South America since the late 1950s. Once identified, the harmless bees could then be trucked from the area, isolating the Africanized variety to be eradicated.

‘The First Priority’

The two bee strains look virtually the same to the naked eye and until recently the main method of identifying bees has been a weeks-long analysis of large samples of bees--too lengthy a process to rely on now as officials try to defuse the potential danger of swarms of vicious bees moving across the state’s agricultural heartland.

“We’ve got to move the domestic bees out, that’s the first priority,” Berryhill said. “We’re no further along than on Friday.”

On Saturday, officials began setting up an Africanized bee search headquarters in the small Kern County town of Lost Hills, where over the next couple of days they will put to the test the speedy-but-unproven method of analyzing bees, which involves examining sticky coverings on their bodies.

If that fails, their only alternatives would be relying on the lengthy identification process or killing all domestic bees.

Then attention will be turned to the next step--ridding the valley of the Africanized bees, which one bee scientist believes could be colonized in as many as six swarms.

That prospect is “like looking for a needle in a haystack,” Berryhill conceded Saturday.

This is the first time an Africanized bee colony has been found in the United States. Experts say that the single swarm discovered in an underground hive in an oil field may have been there as long as one year, probably arriving from South America as “hitchhikers” in oil equipment.

Trying Two Methods

Berryhill said that bee experts will use two methods to try to ferret out the killer bees.

Since Africanized bees are known to take up residence in old beehives, officials will set up about 100 abandoned hives in the quarantined area, using old wax and honeycomb as bait. Officials hope to catch whole swarms with this method.

In addition, small nectar lures could attract individual drones which will be tracked by human observers.

If the bees are not trapped by the lures, spraying is the next step, Berryhill said. And even that may not be the final chapter in the bee saga.

Experts say swarms of Africanized bees can travel as far as 100 miles in two weeks. The quarantine area is only 20 miles wide from the point at which the bees were discovered.

A Source of Concern

“We are lost if they have flown as far as some say they can,” Berryhill said.

Beekeepers in California earn about $55 million annually from pollinating services and the sale of honey and bees. Kern County is among the largest beekeeping counties in the state.

Keepers are also concerned that the Africanized bees, known to carry a wide range of pests, may infect domestic hives.

Len Foote, the Food and Agriculture Department program manager in charge of searching out the killer insects, warned that the bees carry the “very destructive” varro mite from Indochina. Foote said the mite contaminates whole colonies by sucking vital juices from adult bees and wiping out their young.

“This is of great concern to us,” Foote said. “If those mites get into a domestic bee apiary (a collection of 50 hives), the apiary could be wiped out.”