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