>I also know of people who had bees and chickens.  When the bees got upset,
>they would sometimes sting the chickens (as well as the beekeeper, his dog,
>and the neighbor's cat).  Sometimes the chickens died as a result.
 
Live long enough in the bees and you will see everything at least
once, but I have never heard of or seen bees kill a chicken. I have no
doubt that they can or did in this case but the closest I come to seeing
it myself was in recording the early network TV news casts on the
planned arrival of the killer bees from Mexico. In one newscast the bees
in SA were shown attacking a donkey, pigs, and a chicken. One evening
months later a small group of beekeepers dropped by my home and in place
of the usual skin flicks or latest bee horror movie I put this
collection of killer bee hype from network TV on. At the point when the
chicken was getting his a question was asked, (put on the girly tape
or something), and I stopped the tape....
 
Much to everyone's surprise the single frames clearly showed that the
chicken was tethered or tied in front of the hive by a string and to no
one's surprise the bees were indeed attacking it. I have never seen such
expressions of shock on beekeepers faces, personally I was not surprised
at this little extra effort to hype the killer bees as long ago I had
found out that Walt Disney really did not film that famous Living
Desert movie, and that many of the scenes were staged with trapped
animals, and then I have also been lucky and interested enough to
have been able over the years to talk one on one with many of the early
beekeepers and the grad students, (hippies), and bee science gophers,
who did the hands on work with the killer bees in SA and Central
America. And all told me much the same story that the killer bee tale
was at the least being exaggerated by some in the scientific community
by setting up the press and much worse, to gain support for their own
work. Most of the low level bee workers felt the so called killer bees
were then a good resource that should be exploited for the productive
honeybee they were compared to what had been before their arrival,...and
today they are.
 
I have a good reprint on line at the Wild Bee's BBS by ED Zuckerman, one
of the more prolific writers and reporters who was hired to hype the
killer bee's and I am sure no beekeeper has not seen some of his work
over the years. Ed has since had second thoughts about it all and wrote
a magazine article that covers some of the early dirty tricks used by
our American Bee Scientists to cheat the public of their tax dollars and
gain public support for some research that has since been shown to be
of little or of no value.
 
All you have not see this reprint can request it via e-mail by
addressing a message like so:
 
               to: [log in to unmask]
 
                        ttul Andy-
 
 
(c) Permission is granted to freely copy this document
in any form, or to print for any use.
 
(w)Opinions are not necessarily facts. Use at own risk.
---
 ~ QMPro 1.53 ~ ... Barbs has it, like a bee.