Adrian Wenner wrote:
>    From reports, Africanized honey bee colonies pose little
>more danger to us than what we routinely experience with yellow jacket
>wasp colonies in this area.

        I wonder whether one couldn't go further and say
    From reports, Africanized honey bee colonies pose little or no
more danger to us than what we routinely experience with yellow jacket
wasp colonies in this area.

        One reason I ask consideration of this expression is that, from my
position on the sidelines, the concept 'AHB' is extraordinarily vague, not
connoting any precise genotype or phenotype.  From what has been said on
Bee-L the term 'AHB' has only vague meaning.
        My morbid interest in dangerous technologies has taught me that
people are sometimes more interested in the hazard  i.e. the extent of harm
in the unlikely worst scenario, than in the risk i.e the probability of
this disaster's occurrence.  The media image is that AHB means hevi-doodi
quasi-SF killer gangs  -  hazard 1 or a few people killed per hive,
probability 1.0   ...  but some remarks from USA beekeepers suggest 'AHB'
can also mean far less dangerous strains of bee.  Could it be that both the
hazard and the risk have decreased considerably since AHB rampaged N of the
Rio Grande?
        I can warn you the major commercial 'risk assessment' corporations
-  Arthur D Little, Science Applications Inc, etc  -  multiply hazard times
risk and then call that 'risk'.  We are talking hevi-doodi
language-tampering here.  Anyone dealing with legal regulations on bees
should think about both hazard and risk.  And of course the under-rated
benefits of honey-bees must be accurately sketched in such democratic
exercises.

        The few scientists in bee genetics are obviously outstripped by
rapid changes in strains of bee.  I really meant that about the confab.
Better cooperation between researchers, commercial beekeepers, and
amateurs, must be organised against mounting threats to bees from
pesticides & gene-tampering.

R