 European honey bees have been major contributors to America's agricultural productivity. The bees are responsible for pollinating crops worth over $19 billion each year. In addition, they produce valuable honey for consumption by millions of people, here and abroad. Now there's a threat to our peaceful honey bees. The potential invaders are now in Central America and are predicted to reach the Texas border by 1989. The newcomers are Africanized bees, sometimes called killer bees, and they have a nasty disposition. What is being done to control this threat to the American beekeeping industry and the possible danger to U.S. citizens? Following recommendations by the National Academy of Sciences, U.S. Department of Agriculture Research teams have conducted tests in French Guiana, Venezuela, Argentina, and in Baton Rouge, Louisiana to get information on how to handle these maverick bees. In Venezuela, Dr. Tom Rinderer heads a research team that has made significant progress toward understanding these unusual bees that swarm frequently, have a high reproductive rate, and are very defensive in protecting their hives. African bees were brought to South America by the Brazilian government in 1956. The intention was to create a program of bee breeding with African bees to produce a stock that was much more tropically adapted than the European bees that they were using in Brazil. The consequences of this program have been that a population of Africanized bees have now spread throughout almost all of South America and into much of Central America. The Africanized bees are slightly smaller than the gentle European bees, but it is difficult to tell the difference between the two types of bees. So putting together an identification system has been a major priority of the research team. Dead bees are shipped back to the Baton Rouge lab where Dr. Alan Sylvester has developed techniques for improved identification. Africanized bees are just a subspecies and somewhat hybrids with the European bees that we have in this country, and it makes them very difficult to identify because they are, at least to some extent, hybrids. There are no clear distinct differences that we can use to identify Africanized bees. So the only option we have at the present time is to go to a fairly complicated computer identification procedure measuring a number of different characteristics. Bees have two pairs of wings. The four-wing seems to be the main character that shows a consistent difference between Africanized and European honey bees. Using the information gathered from the computer identification procedure, Dr. Renderer and Dr. Sylvester have developed a two-step, fast Africanized bee identification system known as FABUS. The first step can clear out about 85% of the bee samples. It involves mounting 10 four-wings on slides, then projecting the slides on a wall and measuring the four-wing links. The average of these links is then compared to a table of probability of Africanization. Another 12% of the suspect bees can be identified by adding the measurements of 10 hind-wings, 10 femur links, and the average body weight of 10 freshly killed bees. These statistics are also compared to a table of probability. The remaining 3% are sent to Beltsville, Maryland for computer-aided identification. Identifying the bees is important because it can show the effects of bee breeding programs already underway. One key factor in the movement of the bees is that they have not encountered beekeepers with as much expertise as American beekeepers. The U.S. beekeepers will provide the first line of defense against the African bees. If the beekeepers can keep an area filled with gentle European bees, there will be fewer wild colonies of the African bees, thus lowering the risk of people being stung by the wild bees. Requeening the hives will be a major priority of the beekeepers once the bees arrive. Philip Rossman has a bee business in Georgia. I'm Philip Rossman. My business is Rossman Aperies Incorporated in Moultrie, Georgia, a little town in the extreme southern Georgia. We produce packaged bees and queens for sale. We also are in honey production and do a little bit of pollination services. I think we're in very serious trouble and we have to look at the scope of the business and change our way of rearing queens and breeding queens. We've got to have a tighter, more closely watched genetic control of the bees and I feel like the natural matings may be out of the question. We might have to go to artificial insemination 100 percent. In Venezuela, the researchers have made extensive studies on the defensive behavior of the mean bees. Dr. Anita Collins has run stinging tests on the bees after disturbing their hives. The tests have shown that these bees respond up to 30 times faster to a moving target and inflict 10 times as many stings in 30 seconds as domestic bees. Each Africanized bees sting contains slightly less venom than the sting of an European bee. However, it is likely that many more Africanized bees will sting an intruder. This stinging behavior could cause serious problems for American beekeepers unless they can keep the mean bees out of their apiaries. Other tests in Venezuela have shown that beekeepers may need to use some new techniques to make sure that queens will mate in the wild with European drones instead of ill-tempered Africanized drones. Dr. Rick Helmick is working on this project. The one project that we are pursuing right now is trying to produce thousands of drones in an area, and we call it drone flooding. And hopefully by flooding an area with several thousand drones, we'll be able to skew the number of drones that the queen mates with toward the Europeans. So when the queen flies, the chances will be increased as she'll mate with a European drone. And then her offspring, for the most part, will be European bees, which is what we prefer. So the drone, which has been neglected by beekeepers and scientists alike, for the most part, may turn out to be one of the keys to coping with the Africanized bee. The bee's amazing ability to reproduce has led the studies on better population management for the bees. Dan Passante, a graduate student working on this project, explains. This could be really important in terms of Africanization because we have found that the stinging episodes are somewhat related in one way to population build-up. And if we could keep the size of the colonies at a level in which they can go out and perform effective foraging flights and collect enough honey for the beekeeper, but at the same time keep them small enough so that the stinging episodes are reduced, it would be of extreme benefit for the beekeeper. We have another graduate student, Robert Danka, who is studying directly whether or not Africanized bees are efficient pollinators on a single flower and how useful they might be in an agro ecosystem where beekeepers truck bees in for pollination purposes. When we're talking about Africanized bees, talking about an animal which is adapted to an environment totally different from what is found in the United States typically, if we find that their foraging behavior is essentially the same as that of European bees, we still know that the defensive behavior of Africanized bee could cause a major problem in an agricultural situation. One very important question has yet to be answered. What effect will colder weather have on how far north the African bee can move into the United States? Dr. Alfred Dietz, professor of entomology at the University of Georgia, is studying the bee's behavior as it moves into colder areas of Argentina. So there are ecological factors which limit them because temperature factors may not be as critical as we believed there are. Of course I don't have all the answers but I want you to realize that we have environmental factors just as important as climatic factors. Africanized bees are certainly noted for their stinging. One of the lesser known things about them is that they are poor honey producers. It's ironic because they were originally brought into Brazil with the thought that they would improve honey production. One of the things our project has done has been study honey production and try to find out exactly what some of the causes are for this reduction in honey production. And once we've figured that out to figure out how we might again improve honey production, it turns out that a major reason why honey production is limited is the tremendous feral population of Africanized bees that occurs in the countryside. These bees provide competition for the nectar and pollen which is in the field and an apiary such as this produces much less honey because of that competition. Perhaps one of the most serious impacts will be on pollination. You see pollination, this is actually the backbone of bees. I mean beekeepers make a living of getting honey and of course some of them make living pollinated. But in general the pollination value of honey bees to agriculture is tremendous. I think the latest figures are 19 or 20 billion dollars. Now this is of course calculated on the basis of the crops we produce. We have totally ignored the value of bees to uncolorated plants, to wildlife, to dune and beach stabilization which we are doing right now in Georgia. This is totally ignored. That figure may be just as high. I mean it's just guesswork. I feel like the general public should not panic at all. They should continue to keep up with the progress of the bees that are moving in and keep up with the reactions of those bees to our continued efforts to dilute them genetically to take away some of the aggressiveness and so we can have bees like we have here now that we'll call domestic bees that the beekeepers are willing to work with. Sometime these bees are going to kill somebody in the United States and the press is going to do a lot of publicity and the public reaction may well be completely adverse towards the beekeeping industry. It's not their fault. And the beekeeping industry is not keeping Africanized bees. The beekeeping industry is hurt by Africanized bees more than the public in general is hurt. But nonetheless a tremendous reaction might occur against the beekeeping industry in general. People will ask beekeepers to move bees off their land even though those bees are as gentle as they always were. This is one of the things we're concerned about that there will be an overreaction to the Africanization of the southern and western United States. One third of the food we eat in the United States is derived from crops that are pollinated by bees. Some of these crops may not be pollinated if beekeepers cannot stay in business using their gentle bees. Now if you have bees in areas as we have now and if Africanized bees come in it will be very difficult. First of all people want to eliminate them. They may be legal problems. We may have to have natural legislation protecting beekeepers because others may say well your bees stang me, they killed my dog or God knows what, that's your fault. So this is a very serious problem. And commercial beekeepers will be able to handle bees, I mean Africanized bees I handle in Argentina. You will have to dress up like Santa Claus of course and it's not, it's going to be difficult probably to get people. I mean the American beekeeper is probably the best trained beekeeper, they know their business, the commercial beekeepers have been doing it for many years and they find ways of handling it. But it's not going to be that you walk out there as we are now, I mean you will be protected. And so you have some situations which I can hardly tell you right now but it's going to be difficult because you drive up in the car and bees will be meeting you at the gate. The Africanized honey bee is coming to the United States in a few years. Beekeepers here are preparing to meet this challenge using methods that researchers have developed. The scientists and beekeepers have the same objective, protect the public from the mean bees while ensuring adequate pollination and a good supply of honey.