In a message dated 4/25/99 3:27:47 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
[log in to unmask] writes:

>A few days ago some members of our neighborhood association in Tucson, Az.
>were quite upset by their neighbors bee keeping activities......(snip)

   Your neighbor is the best long-term protection your community can have. As
the africanized bees have tried to move eastward, they have been drastically
slowed, even stopped, as they ran into areas of intense beekeeping.

    In your area, there were few beekeepers and a large ecological vacuum.
The africanized bees swept right in, because there was little competition.

    Now that you have them, your community needs to have a designated,
well-trained beekeeper on every block.  No good beekeeper will tolerate mean
bees. When I find a mean hive, I will find the queen and kill her, then
replace her with a queen or a cell raised from gentle bee stock. I have to do
this because my bees are almost all placed in orchards and vegetable fields
for pollination, where people walk by them all the time.

    Your local beekeepers may not be able to fight the africanization, but
there are gentle strains among them as well. They need to focus on breeding
and culling to get good bees once again in your area whether European or
African. When the ecologic niche is filled with well managed, gentle bees,
there will be little opportunity for wild, untamed bees to prosper.  The
Brazillians have been living with them for decades, and they actually prefer
the africanized bees. They are healthier and more productive. Certainly in
our day of pollinator shortage, we should take advantage of the opportunity
to breed a better bee.

    Having more beekeepers does not mean there will never be any bee
problems. But in the long term there will be a reduction of extreme problems
from savage bees. For generations people accepted the fact that bees sting.
They didn't like it, but they lived with it. Nowadays anytime there is a
sting (often by a yellow jacket, not even a bee) beekeepers get harrassed or
sued. This is a classic case of stupidity in action, because a good beekeeper
is far more help to a community than harm.

    Several years ago africanized bees escaped from a ship in port in Florida
and became established. By the time they were discovered, the original hive
had swarmed many times. Do you know where most of the swarms settled?
....In the community where they had an ordinance banning beekeeping!

    The more intensely bees are kept, the gentler they will become. Our
Italian bees have been kept for several millinia, and they are quite tame by
comparison to the German bee that's only been kept for a few hundred years.
And the african bee was never kept until modern time.

   The Roman gardener, who may have had a dozen hives, had to kill one to
harvest honey. Which one would he kill?  Of course he'd kill the one that
stung his kids every time they walked by.  That's a breeding and culling
program that promotes gentle bees.

    In central Africa, the bees were wild in the forest. When someone wanted
honey, he would kill a colony in a hollow tree. The colonies most likely to
survive were the ones that were ferocious enough to drive off the robber.
That's selective breeding in favor of fierceness.

    Modern American beekeepers have tools that can speed up the breeding and
culling proceess a great deal. But they must have the opportunity. If you
drive them from the community, you will then have NO controls and you will
deserve the wild bees that you have to deal with.

    Promote beekeeping in every way you can. Make sure new beekeepers are
well trained; africanized bees are not a project for amateurs. You've already
lost ground that you have to regain, and it is a lot harder that way.

[log in to unmask]     Dave Green  Hemingway, SC  USA
The Pollination Scene:  http://users.aol.com/pollinator/polpage1.html
The Pollination Home Page:    http://www.pollinator.com

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