Legendary Killer Bees wimp out at border
(Boston Sunday Herald Nov.16,1997)
Remember Killer Bees?Like something from a blockbuster
summer movie,these alien invaders were going to sweep up the
Yucatan Peninsula into the United States,wreaking havoc as they
spread northward.
But since crossing the U.S. border near Hidalgo,Texas,in
1990,they ve moved little from the strongholds they ve established
in the Southwest.
Researchers now say these tropical bees may have reached what
will be roughly their northern limit in the United States,an area
that includes only the sourthernmost United States.
 A lot of the extreme ideas about these bees have been thrown
out, said William L.Rubink,a research entomologist with the U.S.
Department of Agriculture s Honey Bee Research Laboratory in
Weslaco,Texas.
 Basically,what we ve seen is that the movement north seems to
start decreasing about the 30-degree(latitude)mark.That s pretty
much where we saw it decreasing in South America also as they
spread south into more temperate climates of that continent,he
said.
Native to Africa,these  bees with an attitude were imported to
Brazil in 1956 as part of a genetics experiment.No honeybees are
native to either North or South America.
In 1957,some of the African bees escaped and began to interbreed
with existing Brazilian wild European honeybee
populations,passing along their aggressive traits in the process.
The bees have colonized parts of four states-Texas,Arizona,New
Mexico and California.But since 1994,they ve added no new
states to that list and have not moved much farther in those four
states.
-Newshouse News Service