>The Aurora Sentinel recently printed an article about the City Council
>Committee meeting about banning bees in residential areas of the city.
>
>http://www.zwire.com/site/News.cfm?BRD=1947&dept_id=168651&newsid=7030971&PAG=461&rfi=9

Although the following response to the news article is on this website, I
have found that access to such sites can become stale; I thought this was
such a well written response to a classic problem that it deserves to be
archived.  Mea McNeil

Name: Dave Green
Date: Feb, 18 2003 The city council needs to consider the deeper
ramifications rather than make knee-jerk reactions. There is an ecological
niche that WILL be filled, whether it is by controlled domestic bees, or by
wild bees and wasps.There is a tremendous variety of behaviors of the
various strains of honeybees and other bee and wasp species. As a
beekeeper, if I have a mean hive, I will kill the queen and replace her
with one from gentle stock. The strains of bees that are kept by American
beekeepers have been subject to this kind of selective breeding in favor of
gentleness since Roman times. The original bee brought by the colonists to
the US was the german black bee, which had been domesticated a much shorter
time, and was much nastier. I've worked with these bees, and have
eliminated them from my own use. My bees are used for crop pollination,
with farm workers frequently around them. Another bee that has been totally
wild until modern times has entered the US. The bee originated from an area
of Africa where there is no tradition of beekeeping. When someone wants
honey, they find the bee tree and kill the hive. In this circumstance the
bees that are violent enough to drive off human and animal intruders are
the ones most likely to survive. Such selective breeding has created a
fierce bee. Some of these africanized hives are awesome to behold. The
africanized bee has moved into many open areas of the Southwest, across
western Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and some parts of Southern California.
But it has not been able to penetrate very far eastward, because it
encounters a very high concentration of beekeepers in eastern Texas. In
Florida some years ago, africanized bees apparently escaped from a ship at
a port and became established. By the time they were discovered, there were
many daughter colonies that had moved from the original entry site. All but
one of these swarms had gone to the area with the biggest empty ecological
niche -- you guessed it!... the community that had an ordinance banning
beekeeping. If I were a city official in an area with africanized bees, I
would try to set up a defense of designated beekeepers to saturate the area
with gentle, managed bees, rather than allowing the wild ones to enter a
vacuum. Even with the africanized bees, there are gentle hives. Brazillian
beekeepers are finding that with modern breeding methods they can select
these gentle ones, and cull the mean ones, to tame the race much faster
that we ever could before. Beekeepers in Brazil and other Latin American
countries have already helped to greatly reduce the problems that
originally characterized this bee. The more beekeepers, the better for the
public. Bees can and are managed in suburban and urban areas of the world
with proper safeguards. The beekeepers who do this perform a great service
to the community in free pollination of gardens, and they help to protect
the public from unmanaged, untamed replacements that could cause a lot more
problems. If I had an allergy, as Ms. Dorris, I would be afraid to go
outdoors at any time, because there are many hymenopterans that can sting.
I would quickly get myself to a competent allergist and get the series of
shots that give protection. Then I could consider the question from a more
objective frame of mind rather than from fear. Do you want to have the
totally wild and random population of this ecological niche, or do you want
the measure of protection that is provided to you by beekeepers, who don't
want mean bees any more than you do, and will work hard to keep only gentle
strains. As a long term beekeeper, I had a systemic reaction to a single
bee sting, once in my life when I was on a pain-killing drug in the
ibuprofen family, while recuperating from surgery. The reaction frightened
me, and it also made me think that I might not be able to return to my
occupation, but as soon as the drug cleared my system, I had no further
reaction. I wonder how many trips to the emergency room are not from true
allergic reactions but to interactions between these common pain killers


MEA McNeil

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