Africanized bees confirmed in Santa Barbara What we have anticipated for several years has now occurred, so I thought I should inform BEE-L subscribers about what has transpired. On August 4th a bee swarm moved into a discarded trash can in our Santa Barbara area (town of Goleta). The concerned resident contacted the local Vector Control office. Their crew exterminated the bees and sent a sample up to Sacramento for identification and learned that those bees were Africanized. This was the first record of AHB in our county, but the local agriculture office did not receive that confirmation until the first part of September. A bee swarm occupied my backyard swarm hive in the afternoon of September 2nd, very late in the season. Also, I was surprised to find that they foraged before sunrise. The next morning I moved that occupied swarm hive up to our experimental bee yard at the base of the local mountain range. The following morning, our daily paper carried the banner headline, "Killer Bees," referring to the find in Goleta. I thus gathered a sample of the stragglers from our yard and took them to the county agricultural office, where they planned to send that sample to Sacramento for identification. The "Killer Bee" headline stirred me to action. I phoned the Opinion page editor of the daily paper and indicated that I would like to write a commentary before everything got out of hand. He agreed and allowed me 1000 words. He said my piece would not appear during the week of 9/11; he wanted it to appear in the following Sunday morning edition for greater prominence. In the meantime, items appeared in the several weekly papers, with various degrees of misinformation. One letter included the claim, "If you were to breach the perimeter of a hive's territory, you would first encounter the guard drones." Another weekly paper had a color photo on the front page that included a debris laden dead worker bee missing all but one hind wing and most of its legs. My commentary ("Let's not lose perspective about bees") appeared in the Sunday paper and included information about the value of bees and the importance of beekeepers. I also included the county agriculture department web site (www.countyofsb.org/agcomm/default.asp); it had very complete information about Africanized honey bees. The morning after my commentary appeared, the daily paper published an editorial endorsing the points I had made ("Be a honey, don't kill bees"). Surprisingly, the AHB have been established in the Los Angeles Basin since January of 1999, but remarkably few stinging incidents have occurred. We also could have had AHB in our area for a couple of years, but no one has complained. It's almost as if AHB "mellowed out" when reaching our area. Time will tell. Adrian -- Adrian M. Wenner (805) 963-8508 (home office phone) 967 Garcia Road [log in to unmask] Santa Barbara, CA 93103 www.beesource.com/pov/wenner/index.htm **************************************************************************** * * "T'is the majority [...that] prevails. Assent, and you are sane * Demur, you're straightway dangerous, and handled with a chain." * * Emily Dickinson, 1862 * ****************************************************************************