Africanized bees confirmed in Santa Barbara

    What we have anticipated for several years has now occurred, so I
thought I should inform BEE-L subscribers about what has transpired.

    On August 4th a bee swarm moved into a discarded trash can in our
Santa Barbara area (town of Goleta).  The concerned resident
contacted the local Vector Control office.  Their crew exterminated
the bees and sent a sample up to Sacramento for identification and
learned that those bees were Africanized.  This was the first record
of AHB in our county, but the local agriculture office did not
receive that confirmation until the first part of September.

    A bee swarm occupied my backyard swarm hive in the afternoon of
September 2nd, very late in the season.  Also, I was surprised to
find that they foraged before sunrise.  The next morning I moved that
occupied swarm hive up to our experimental bee yard at the base of
the local mountain range.  The following morning, our daily paper
carried the banner headline, "Killer Bees," referring to the find in
Goleta.

    I thus gathered a sample of the stragglers from our yard and took
them to the county agricultural office, where they planned to send
that sample to Sacramento for identification.

    The "Killer Bee" headline stirred me to action.  I phoned the
Opinion page editor of the daily paper and indicated that I would
like to write a commentary before everything got out of hand.  He
agreed and allowed me 1000 words.  He said my piece would not appear
during the week of 9/11; he wanted it to appear in the following
Sunday morning edition for greater prominence.

    In the meantime, items appeared in the several weekly papers, with
various degrees of misinformation.  One letter included the claim,
"If you were to breach the perimeter of a hive's territory, you would
first encounter the guard drones."  Another weekly paper had a color
photo on the front page that included a debris laden dead worker bee
missing all but one hind wing and most of its legs.

    My commentary ("Let's not lose perspective about bees") appeared
in the Sunday paper and included information about the value of bees
and the importance of beekeepers.  I also included the county
agriculture department web site
(www.countyofsb.org/agcomm/default.asp); it had very complete
information about Africanized honey bees.

    The morning after my commentary appeared, the daily paper
published an editorial endorsing the points I had made ("Be a honey,
don't kill bees").

    Surprisingly, the AHB have been established in the Los Angeles
Basin since January of 1999, but remarkably few stinging incidents
have occurred.  We also could have had AHB in our area for a couple
of years, but no one has complained.  It's almost as if AHB "mellowed
out" when reaching our area.

    Time will tell.

                                                                        Adrian

--
Adrian M. Wenner                (805) 963-8508 (home office phone)
967 Garcia Road                 [log in to unmask]
Santa Barbara, CA  93103        www.beesource.com/pov/wenner/index.htm

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*    "T'is the majority [...that] prevails.  Assent, and you are sane
*       Demur, you're straightway dangerous, and handled with a chain."
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*                                    Emily Dickinson, 1862
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