Bug Wars: California Posts 10 Most-Unwanted List

SACRAMENTO —  A puzzled oil field worker watched a swarm of fierce bees sting a rabbit to death in Kern County last June and turned in the alarm for the first thrust into the United States by dreaded “killer bees.”

The invasion of the dangerous bees from Latin America was contained at a cost of $1 million after a five-month campaign by federal and state agricultural workers.

It brought a new, long-term enemy into California’s many-sided war against insects.

The state Department of Food and Agriculture will spend $35.3 million in this fiscal year to defend California’s $14-billion farm industry from plant-destroying bugs. About $6.5 million comes from direct assessments on growers, mostly in the cotton industry.

The campaign against the “killer bees” was popular, possibly because the public had been primed earlier with horror movies on the subject. Nobody was eager to learn to live with the new bees.

Otherwise, the war on bugs is not universally cheered.

Many urban Californians--whose paychecks are not directly affected by insects--fear the bugs less than the pesticides used to stamp the bugs out. Social activists question the state’s right to spray for insects around people with allergies or in the backyards of hostile property owners.

Bugs have become part of the question of whether agriculture and city people can coexist in the long run in an increasingly urban state.

Scientists say the “killer bees” found near the hamlet of Lost Hills in the San Joaquin Valley were a tiny vanguard of an invasion into the United States by the dangerous insects expected in the 1990s.

Their original home was Africa, and entomologists call them “Africanized bees.” They got loose in Brazil in the early 1950s when colonies imported from Africa for a breeding experiment escaped from a laboratory.

Spreading Northward

Unlike the European bees in the Western Hemisphere, Africanized bees launch mass attacks on people and animals that come too close to their nests. In Latin America they have been blamed for more than 150 human deaths.

They have spread steadily northward, mating with local bees, many of whose offspring retain the African bees’ aggressive traits. Now active on the southern border of Mexico, the bees are expected to enter the United States in force around the end of the decade.

State Food and Agriculture Director Clare Berryhill said the swarms found in Kern County may have traveled in a containerized shipment of oil-drilling equipment from Latin America.

Assistant Director I. A. Siddiqui said state and federal entomologists have learned lessons from the 1985 Africanized bee episode that will be useful later on.

It took almost a month to identify the first bees found in the San Joaquin Valley as African. Now the job can be done in a day or two. Inspections of cargo ships have been tightened. Next year’s state budget is expected to have money for “killer bee” countermeasures.

In 1985, as in other years, agricultural officials had to struggle in the courts and Legislature to keep some of their anti-insect wars going.

The classic confrontation came in the 1980-82 campaign against the Mediterranean fruit fly in the region south of San Francisco Bay. Fearful residents of the area resorted to lawsuits and demonstrations to oppose aerial drops of malathion, the chemical used against the pest. In a few cases, helicopters distributing the chemical were fired on from the ground.

As result, the state has shifted its tactics to early detection. Bushes and trees all over California today are decorated with 140,000 insect traps, designed to spot unwanted new bugs and contain them before they can spread.

The goal is to avoid unpopular spraying of urban regions from the air, but Siddiqui avoids promises that aerial spraying will not be used again in an emergency.

Nowadays insects hitch rides all over the world by jetliner, ship and truck. For instance, tree-destroying gypsy moths ride in from the East Coast on the garden furniture of people moving to California.

Under a program launched in 1984, county agricultural inspectors now check the furniture of new arrivals from gypsy moth states.

Unusual Pests

Crop-threatening bugs never before seen in California, like the peach fly of India and Australia’s Queensland fly, are showing up in traps around international airports. Local eradication campaigns so far have snuffed them out.

Like the FBI’s list of 10 most-wanted lawbreakers, the state Department of Food and Agriculture has its list of “10 most-unwanted” bugs.

In late December, four of them were active in California--the Oriental fruit fly, the gypsy moth, the Japanese beetle and the cotton-devouring boll weevil.

The other six, which did not make major trouble in 1985, are the Mediterranean fruit fly, the Mexican fruit fly, the Caribbean fruit fly, the melon fly, the grain-eating Khapra beetle and citrus canker bacteria.

The department also copes with the pink bollworm, a cotton killer that can be contained but never eradicated; the carob moth, which eats dates in Southern California, and the gypsy moth.

Commercial beekeepers are threatened by the acarine mite, a devastating killer of bees with a foothold in several American states. Inspections of incoming hives were tightened in 1984. In November, 829 bee colonies shipped from South Dakota had to be destroyed near Modesto after the mite was found in some of them. Destruction of tainted hives is the only known solution.

Insect by insect, here is how some of California’s bug wars went in 1985:

APPLE MAGGOT--This apple destroyer set off battles in the courts and Legislature in 1985. The state temporarily called off a $2.6-million campaign against it in July after a Superior Court judge in Humboldt County ruled in favor of a suit by local environmentalists. The court held that the state erred by not drawing up an environmental impact report for the campaign. It also upheld the right of local apple growers not to be sprayed against their wishes.

The campaign resumed after rural legislators rushed a bill through the Legislature to undo parts of the decision. An invader from Oregon, the maggot has been found in six counties in far Northern California. The idea is to keep it away from the state’s main apple-growing regions.

JAPANESE BEETLE--An outbreak in the Sacramento suburb of Orangevale has pitted the Department of Food and Agriculture against local activists since 1983. Originally, department employees attacked the beetle with a combination of spraying and soil treatment in a five-square-mile area with about 10,000 population. Much of the work has to be done in yards of private homes.

A well-organized minority has fought the project. Some submitted to arrest rather than consent to spraying. In 1985 only one of the fruit- and vegetable-eating insects was found, compared to 67 in 1984. The spraying area has been reduced. There will be no spraying in 1986 unless more beetles are found.

GYPSY MOTH--Santa Cruz County officials won a court decision in March forbidding the state to carry out aerial spraying with carbaryl, an organic pesticide, against the moth in the Felton area. The judge permitted the aerial use of B.t., a biological control agent, combined with ground spraying of carbaryl. Environmentalists claim B.t. is just as effective against the moth.

No more moths were found after the spraying, but state entomologists say they will not be sure of the result until mid-1986. A destroyer of shade trees, the moth arrives on furniture shipped from the East Coast and from Oregon where it has a strong foothold. A furniture inspection program has helped reduce its spread. Besides Felton, it now is serious only in the Fremont area of Alameda County.

ORIENTAL FRUIT FLY--There were numerous finds of this fruit-destroying pest in the Long Beach and Glendale areas and around Sunnyvale in Santa Clara County. This bug is not one of The Food and Agriculture Department’s big worries. It has been fought many times and does not require aerial spraying. A chemical derived from cloves is a strong sex lure for male flies. It can be mixed with pesticides and attached to power poles and other safe locations. In late December, finds of the fly were down, and Siddiqui said, “Treatment seems to be working.”

MEXICAN FRUIT FLY--In 1984, the state resorted to an unpopular aerial spraying campaign to eradicate the insect from a 62-square-mile urban region around Hawthorne in Los Angeles County. There was a flurry of excitement in 1985 when live maggots of the fly were found in mangoes imported from Mexico at stores in Marysville, Madera and in the Los Angeles area. Mexican officials worked with the U.S. Department of Agriculture to tighten inspections of mango exports. No more maggots were found.

BOLL WEEVIL--In California, this legendary cotton destroyer seems to be on the run. Arizona and Mexico have joined California in an eradication project. They were the sources of a weevil infestation that took root in Imperial County. With countermeasures taken by Arizona and Mexico, the area of California cotton land that had to be treated this year declined about 67% to 46,000 acres. The Food and Agriculture Department’s long-range concern is to keep this pest out of the San Joaquin Valley cotton belt.