U.S. Enters Bee Fight With Own Quarantine

LOST HILLS, Calif. —  Beekeepers operating in the area around this Kern County community were struck another blow Thursday, when the U.S. Department of Agriculture joined the state in imposing a quarantine on the movement of bees and honey.

A 462-square-mile area surrounding this town northwest of Bakersfield has been under quarantine by the state Department of Food and Agriculture since July 25, when the discovery of a year-old colony of Africanized honeybees was announced. The so-called killer bees had been discovered in a burrow by an oil field worker in June, but it took a month to determine that the bees were the Africanized variety.

The federal government quarantine means the movement of bees will now be restricted interstate as well as intrastate.

Since the initial discovery, two more colonies of Africanized bees have been found. Officials, afraid that swarms of these more aggressive bees might spread to other areas, will not allow any honeycomb-filled boxes to be taken out of the quarantine area until tests prove that the hives are free of the Africanized bees.

Officials estimate that it will take two months to clear all of the 9,200 hives in the quarantine area, if no other Africanized bees are found.

The second and third colonies were discovered within the last eight days, one in a commercial hive two miles south of the original site, the other in a hollow tree five miles farther southwest. State regulators killed both colonies and sent samples to the U.S. Department of Agriculture laboratory in Baton Route, La., where they were confirmed to be Africanized.

Because the second colony was in a commercial hive, regulators put a six-week hold order on all hives within a two-mile radius “to prevent the removal of bees or honeycombs containing bees” until any remaining Africanized bee eggs have had time to hatch.

Officials will also test all apiaries within a 2-by-20-mile area north of the quarantine area, as a result of the additional finds.

For the two dozen beekeepers whose apiaries are widely scattered across the arid, rolling hills west of Interstate 5, the quarantine’s timing could not have been worse. With the cotton and alfalfa fields in bloom, their bees have been making honey, lots of it.

“Normally, July and August are the best time of the year for us, but we’ve got to move the honey or we’re in serious trouble,” said Don Schram of Oxnard. He has 50,000 pounds of honey valued at $25,000 tied up by the quarantines.

State officials, however, are unmoved.

World Watching

“The world is watching, we are not going to let the situation get away from us,” said Len Foote, the state bee expert heading up the eradication project.

Because the state’s beekeepers ship queen bees all over the world, it is “imperative” that no Africanized bees get out of the quarantine area, he said.

Foote told beekeepers that they could set up honey extraction operations within the quarantine area and market their honey if it passed inspection. However, beekeepers regard this as an impractical solution, because all of the equipment brought into the area would have to remain until the quarantine is lifted, at least six months from now. It means that they would not be able to use the extractors in any other areas where they have hives.

Because he has nearly 1,800 hives in the quarantine area, Schram is perhaps the hardest hit. As he worked in one of his apiaries, he talked about the Africanized bee scare and its impact on his business.

Bee management is a juggling act, he explained. In nature, bees fill a hive by building a comb and filling it with honey; then when the hive gets crowded, the queen “swarms” away, taking most of the bees with her in the search for new quarters. An “emerging” queen is left behind to repopulate the original hive.

Extra Rooms Created

However, such natural swarming leaves the beekeeper without honeybees. To prevent this from happening, beekeepers stack empty comb boxes, called “supers” on top of the hives, creating extra rooms that the bees sense they must fill before they swarm away.

Schram explained that as the bees fill the supers with honeycomb, he replaces them with empties. Normally, the honey-laden supers then are trucked back to his Oxnard warehouse, where the honey is extracted and shipped to market.

However, now he cannot truck his supers to Oxnard. So, to prevent queens from swarming off his hives, he has stacked on more supers, creating unwieldy “high-rise” colonies. When he ran out of supers he had to spend $5,600 to buy more.

And there his honey sits, in the comb, ripe to be stolen by other bees. When they find no more nectar in the fields, bees search neighboring hives for honey they can steal.

Schram has rented an unused, small airplane hangar in the quarantine area and is sealing it to make it bee tight, hoping that the regulators will then allow him to store his honey-filled supers there, until his apiaries are sampled and cleared by inspectors.

Honey production is not his only worry, though. Beekeepers also earn income by providing bees for pollinating orchards and fields for farmers. Schram grosses $106,000 a year, about half of it pollinating almonds, avocados, alfalfa and cotton in Ventura, Santa Barbara and Kern counties. To do this, he must move his bees from one area to another. However, not a hive can be moved out of the quarantine area for now.

Schram recognizes that in large numbers, the African honeybees might pose a threat to his business, but one that he is certain he could live with, although it would mean more work.

European Strains

“If the African bees ever get established here, I think we could could get by by re-queening twice a year with certified European queens and genetically keep the influence of the African strains out of our bees,” he said.

African honeybees were introduced into Brazil in a 1956 scientific experiment that went awry when the bees escaped. They have been dubbed killer bees because of their aggressive nature.

Africanized bee colonies had infested Central America by 1982 and are expected to cross Mexico and move into Texas and California by 1990. No way has been found to stop the advance.

The Africanized bees discovered in June are not a part of the northward migration. Experts theorize that the Lost Hills bees “hitchhiked” on oil field equipment that had been shipped into the area a year or more ago.