Domesticated Beehives May Face Destruction : State Considers Move if Efforts to Locate Killer Variety Fail; Owners Would Be Compensated
LOST HILLS, Calif. — In an effort to locate and destroy missing swarms of Africanized honeybees, thousands of hives of domesticated bees in a 400-square-mile quarantine area may have to be destroyed and the owners compensated by the state, top state agriculture officials said Friday.
A number of top officials confirmed that destruction of all bees is under consideration, an indication of how seriously they regard the discovery of a large, underground hive of the ferocious bees in an oil field near this sparsely populated community 45 miles northwest of Bakersfield.
The officials stressed that the destruction of 104 apiaries in the area--containing more than 5,000 hives--is a last resort in the battle against the so-called killer bees.
Identification Method
But avoiding the mass destruction of hundreds of millions of common honeybees will depend on the effectiveness of a yet untested method for identifying the Africanized bees. The analysis is essential to moving ordinary hives out of the area so that any remaining Africanized bees could be located and destroyed.
Only days after the Africanized bee hive was positively identified, the state Department of Food and Agriculture has begun mobilizing federal, state and Kern County resources in a growing effort to stop the spread of the Africanized colonies. The bees, which are no more venomous than ordinary honeybees but much more likely to attack en masse, may be more of a threat to crops and the domesticated bee industry than to the general population.
A spokesman for the department compared the mobilization to the 1981 effort to eradicate the Mediterranean fruit fly, a pest that also represented a significant agricultural threat.
Based on their unearthing of the underground hive of Africanized bees, scientists now believe that the colony may have been in place for more than a year and that several queens may have left the original nest followed by a swarm of drones and worker bees.
“There could be up to six swarms, and that would be very serious,†said Norman Gary, a UC Davis scientist who is helping lead the search for the Africanized bees.
Not a great deal is known about the habits and life styles of the Africanized bees.
Gary said that the hybrid, Africanized bees are highly mobile. “We don’t know how far they can fly,†he said.
“There is conjecture and some evidence that a swarm can move as much as 100 miles in two weeks,†said a University of Kansas scientist, Orley R. Taylor, who is acting as a consultant to California officials.
“If in fact the evidence shows they have swarmed in Kern County, they are going to have to expand the radius of the area they’re searching,†Taylor said in a telephone interview.
Len Foote, who is coordinating the search for the state Department of Food and Agriculture, acknowledged that the domesticated bees brought each year into Kern County to pollinate crops may have to be destroyed unless the untested method for rapidly identifying Africanized varieties proves effective.
Plan to Set Out Bait
In an effort to find the Africanized bees, scientists plan to set out bait in the 400-square mile area surrounding the five-foot-long, abandoned hive that workers uncovered earlier this week. By determining the direction that bees fly as they leave the lures, it should be possible to locate the wild colonies, Foote explained.
However, that method of locating swarms of Africanized bees will not work in an area that is saturated with domesticated honeybees.
State officials will not allow a domesticated beehive to be removed from the area until they are certain that it is free of Africanized bees.
“We must get all the domesticated bees out,†Foote said. “We hope to be able to test and have the beekeepers remove them.â€
The usual test used to identify Africanized bees requires making multiple anatomical measurements of 50 bees in each hive--a process that would be too time consuming in this instance.
Compensation Fears
As an alternative, authorities may check the thousands of hives in the area using a relatively new, untested method developed by University of Florida scientists. The test involves analysis of fatty substances that cover the bodies of bees.
If that method proves impractical, there may be little choice but to destroy domesticated bees--a prospect that already has local beekeepers worried that they may not be adequately compensated for their losses. A single hive of up to 50,000 bees is worth about $100. Total compensation could exceed $500,000 for the hives believed to be in the quarantine area.
“You’ll see beekeepers grab their bees and take off running if they are not reimbursed sufficiently,†said Jeff Sampson, president of Kern County Beekeepers Assn. “The problem could spread even more. They wouldn’t just lay down and let the government roll over them.â€
After a parasite infestation on the East Coast, some beekeepers slipped out of the area with bee colonies rather than allow them to be destroyed, Sampson said. As a result, the parasites spread throughout the area.
Meanwhile, the growing team that includes a score of insect experts by Friday had begun searching domestic hives that might have been infiltrated by the Africanized bees and investigating several reports of wild bees suspected of being the missing swarms.
No New Swarms Found
Teams of county and state agricultural workers donned protective equipment and rapped on domestic hives with hammers in the hopes of disturbing any Africanized bees, which are easily provoked. The search turned up no new swarms. They then placed quarantine tags on the hives.
There have been at least two other reports of wild bee sightings that government experts are now investigating. In one case, an oil field employee reported spotting bees in the ground near an oil well about three-quarters of a mile from the original site. In another instance, a family said they had seen a swarm of bees in a tree behind their Lost Hills home a few weeks ago.
Officials also have launched a systematic, door-to-door search in the sparsely populated area, hoping for additional clues to the whereabouts of the missing bees.
On Thursday, just a quarter of a mile from the original, excavated bee hive, team members located a suspicious swarm of bees and honeycombs in the branch of a tamarisk tree. The officials cut down the branch, killed the bees and sent samples off to a laboratory to determine if they are the Africanized variety.
Not Belligerent
The bees may not be what the search crews are looking for, because the insects did not show belligerent behavior.
The colony of Africanized bees was first discovered in June by an oil field skiploader operator who watched in dismay as a cloud of bees attacked and killed a cottontail rabbit.
At first, state agriculture officials minimized the seriousness of the threat to agriculture and the general population because they believed that a single, isolated colony of Africanized bees would have trouble surviving in the arid conditions of Kern County.
State Food and Agriculture Director Clare Berryhill speculated that the swarm may have arrived in California by ship in a containerized cargo of oil field equipment brought here from South America.
The Kern County hive represents the first Africanized bees to form a colony in the United States.
Much More Serious
Berryhill is now convinced that the situation is much more serious than first believed.
“They are not good pollinizers, they are not good honey gatherers. If they got out of control, we could lose the bee industry,†Berryhill said.
The California Farm Bureau Federation has pointed out that 21 fruit and nut crops and 20 vegetable seed crops--representing a total annual production of $2 billion--depend on domesticated, European beehives for pollination.
And the European bees are an important source of income by themselves. Beekeepers in the state earned $27.8 million for pollinating crops, $19 million in honey sales, and $7.8 million in the sale of bees in 1984. Kern County beekeepers ranked second among California’s 58 counties in pollination fees ($4.49 million) and fifth in honey sales ($1 million) in 1984.
Wouldn’t Survive
If agriculture officials decide to destroy hives in the area, many of the smaller apiary firms would not survive, said Mike Mulligan, owner of Glory Bee Co. in Kern County. And the problems, he said, would not be confined to the bee industry.
“If my business went under, only I would suffer,†he said. “But if beekeeping in the region had a real tough time, it would cut into the whole agricultural industry in the San Joaquin Valley.â€
Most apiary firms use their bees about half the time for pollination of such crops as almonds, melons and seed alfalfa. The more difficult and expensive it is to obtain bees, he said, the more costly it is to harvest crops.
The Africanized bees also carry a host of parasites that pose a grave threat to domestic bees, said Sampson, president of the Beekeepers Assn. One type of parasite reduces the bees’ honey production and can destroy hives and another kills the larvai.
“That’s the biggie for the bee industry,†said Sampson. “If you find the Africanized bees you can kill them but the mites can spread all over.â€
As a result of the Africanized bee find, the state of Arizona closed its borders Friday to shipments of bees from California.
Ronald B. Taylor reported from Lost Hills and Paul Jacobs reported from Sacramento. Times staff writer Miles Corwin in Lost Hills also contributed to this story.
