> statistical certainty? I would think the U.S. would get 
> pests off containers before Australia!

Yeah, you'd think that from the gross numbers, but you'd
be, ummm... wrong.

You'd change your mind if you looked at the types of cargoes
and types of ships.  The US just doesn't get a whole lot 
of agricultural imports from Indo-Asia.  Australia does.  
They process and add value to these imports, and re-export 
them.

Remember the honey up in Canada that was contaminated with
trace levels of nitrofurans?  It came from Australia.
But not quite.  It came from South America, where the
drugs were used in beehives, and was imported by the
Australian honey packer (Capilano Honey) and blended
with Australian honey, and then exported to Canada.

And when you want a container that has a good chance of 
containing stowaway bees, you want agriculture, as bees 
just don't have as much chance of getting into a container 
full of cheap electronic consumer goods or anything else 
in the way of "manufactured goods" as they do getting 
into a container that was loaded "in the field" with 
things like fresh produce.  That's the cool thing about
multi-mode containers - they can be slapped down anywhere,
filled, picked up, trucked to the docks, loaded on a ship
and whisked to their destination without anyone ever needing
to glance at the container.  (If not for containers, "World
Trade" would have never gotten so frantic.)

Also, one has to consider distance.  The shorter run between
Indonesia/Asia and Australia means that older, less well-run,
less well-maintained ships can make the run.  It takes better
ships, better crews, and more profitable cargoes to make the
longer runs around to the other side of the planet.  The incidence
of sloppy oversight over cargo, and even the ship holds themselves
containing swarms tends to be higher with the barely-seaworthy
"coastal freighters" that tend to be making these shorter runs.

> Australia only gets a *tiny* percent ( population big difference)
> of the containers we get in the U.S. from areas of T. clareae.  

Population really does not enter into the equation as much as
you might think off the top of your head.  What matters is the
importation of raw materials, the adding of value, and the 
re-exporting of finished goods.  Australians do this a lot.
One has to count all the customers of Australia's export trade
in with the population of Australia.

> All of our current pests could have come off swarms on containers!

Sure, but funny how we have gotten AHB from Central and South America
rather than African bees direct from Africa, isn't it?  Isn't it also
funny that Australia has discovered several incursions of Apis cerana, 
while we've had zero?

No, its not funny, unusual, or strange at all.  The same exact phenomena
is at work here.  In the case of the Western Hemisphere, the short-run, 
rundown, "coastal freighters" work between Central America and Florida.

The same problem works the same way here as it does around Australia.  

So, while your scenario does not fit the actual experience of the US
in regard to what we've gotten, and the likely sources, my scenario
does fit the historical record.

So I'll see your scenario, and raise you a practical mechanism.


My point here is that the US needs to START screening for invasives, 
just like the Aussies have tired their best to do for years.  
http://www.ucsusa.org/news/press_release/screening-for-invasive.html

While the odds of something making it into Australia are lowered by
their inspections of imports and complete ban on imports of bees,
the odds of invasive exotics making it into the USA via Australian
bees would be orders of magnitude better, as it would be very hard 
for something to get by BOTH import inspection programs unnoticed.

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