Africanized bees discovered in central New Mexico

SUSAN MONTOYA

Wednesday, Aug. 4, 1999 | 3:44 a.m.

TIJERAS, N.M. - The din of buzzing bees grew to a roar as beekeeper Fred Frye inspected a new hive last spring. Moments later, the bees swarmed, covering him from head to toe.

Frye was stung 15 to 20 times. He found another 250 stingers in his overalls.

Genetic tests at a U.S. Department of Agricultural laboratory in Maryland determined the bees were a cross between an Africanized honey bee, also called a killer bee, and a more docile European honey bee.

"They just kept getting more and more intense," says Frye, who was swollen, but uninjured after the incident. "I've had my bees stirred up pretty good before, but these were more aggressive. I had several hundred on me, trying to sting me through my shirt and pants."

The Africanized bee is particularly dangerous because it is so aggressive. They have been blamed for at least seven deaths in the Southwest - four in Arizona and three in Texas - since coming to the United States in 1990.

Africanized bees are here to stay, but officials say residents should not worry about black clouds of hostile critters forming in the sky.

"People are already aware of honey bees, bumble bees and yellowjackets. Generally speaking you don't get bothered by any of them unless you get too close to where they're nesting," says Eric Mussen, an extension apiculturist at the University of California-Davis.

"Africanized bees are just like other bees, except that one glaring trait - they are ultra-defensive," he says.

Before the colony in Tijeras was found, agricultural officials had confirmed Africanized bees in only eight southern New Mexico counties. State entomologist Carol Sutherland says the Tijeras hive, about 10 miles from Frye's home, was presumed to be a hybrid with Africanized tendencies.

Frye described the hybrids as some of the most hostile and bitter bees he has encountered during his nine years of beekeeping in the mountains just east of Albuquerque.

Africanized bees also have taken up residence in southwestern Texas as well as the southern parts of Arizona, Nevada and California.

"We really don't know how far north they are," Sutherland says. "But the geographic bridge is there between the southern counties of New Mexico, western counties in Texas and along the water channels in the Rio Grande Valley. With the salt cedar trees and water there, they could easily move north."

But Sutherland says she's not ready to add Bernalillo County - where the hybrid bees were found - to the list of "Africanized" counties. She says the bees have only some traits of the Africanized bee.

State officials suspect, however, that Africanized bees are in other areas of the state. It would be difficult to find every killer bee.

"In some of the other counties where the human population is not as dense, we just haven't had cases where bees and humans have crossed paths," she says.

Justin Schmidt, a bee researcher at the Agricultural Department's Carl Hayden Bee Research Center in Tucson, Ariz., has been studying killer bees for more than a dozen years. He says the bees have been found as far north as Flagstaff, Ariz., which is about the same latitude as Tijeras.

"Sometimes you get this odd quirk - that one of the hives is way out of its normal range," Schmidt says. "They are fairly far north ... but they don't seem to be causing as much trouble as in Tucson and Phoenix.

"Tucson is just bee heaven," he says. "If the weather is good, the bees just go crazy."

Since arriving in Arizona in 1993, authorities say killer bees have been responsible for four deaths, the last in September 1998, when a Tucson man was stung only twice but suffered a fatal allergic reaction.

No fatal encounters have been recorded in New Mexico, but agriculture officials say there have been several reports of livestock and pets being stung.

Nevada officials have confirmed dozens of swarms in the southern part of the state; and in California, agriculture officials say the bees have colonized more than 42,000 square miles.

"There's nothing you can do about it. They've been coming for years," Frye says. "But it's really going to be hard for beekeepers to convince their neighbors that every bee they see is not a killer bee."