Why Are African Honeybees Here?

African honeybees, apis mellifera scutellata, are a species of honeybee that was originally only in Africa. In 1956, Dr. Warwick Kerr, brought several dozen African queen bees from South Africa to Brazil. At that time the honey production in Brazil was failing and Dr. Kerr believed that the more prolific African honeybees would help improve the honey production. His dream was to seclude the African queen bees, taking their offspring and artificially inseminating their offspring with the more gentle European drone “male” bees, thereby retaining their characteristic of natural disease resistance.

While Dr. Kerr was away one weekend, a local hobbyist beekeeper, who was unaware of the research, intentionally removed the “queen excluders” that had previously confined the queen bees. When Dr. Kerr returned, he quickly noted that approximately 17 of the queen bees had escaped (swarmed) into the nearby tropical jungle. Little did he know of the disaster that would ensue as a result of this mishap. What was originally thought would not be a significant problem became a tragedy. Over the next several years, thousands of human and animal lives were lost due to severe stinging attacks by African honeybees.
For years it was believed that the African genetics of these few escaped queen bees and their offspring, would become diluted as the bees expanded northward through South and Central America. Normally, natural mating that would occur with the European honeybees already present would have very quickly diluted out the genetic aggressive characteristics. However, it became very evident that there were biological pressures that existed that somehow permitted the African genetics to remain relatively pure as that species vigorously expanded their territory and construed to travelnorthwards at an alarming rate.

Several U.S. agencies including the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the U.S. Animal, Plant Health Inspection Service, teamed up with Mexican and Panamanian agencies and beekeepers to flood the area just north of the Panama Canal with European breeder honeybee colonies in the hope that an inordinate number of breeder colonies would surely cause the aggressive African genetic strain to be diluted. That endeavor failed. Consequently, their species expanded further north across the Panama Canal, and continued to march through Mexico.

As these African bee colonies continued to multiply, they swarmed away from each other, naturally causing them to swarm into different forage areas that permits the daughter colonies from competing with their parent colonies. At that time it was not known that the certain, but critical, biological behaviors unique to African honeybees, created a barrier that would not allow their genetic purity to be diluted. Moreover, many, if not most, of the undesirable genetic traits turned out to be dominate traits. As a result, when European bees mate with African bees, the genetic dominance of the African bees prevail, creating even more of a problem. Once this undesirable strain of honeybee prevailed in Mexico, there was nothing left to do but prepare for its arrival in the United States.

Our Company History

Our parent company is a large, Tucson based commercial beekeeping company called Arizona Bee Products. It has been in business since the 1970s. It is a very progressive, sophisticated, honey and pollen producing commercial beekeeping company. One of its founders is Tom Martin. He also founded the bee removal company, AAA Africanized Bee Removal Specialists, Inc. for our parent company and is the president of our company. That was in January of 1993. It was clear to Tom Martin and others in our parent company that African honeybees were going to quickly expand into Arizona. For over 40 years Tom Martin has been a commercial beekeeper. During the 1970s, he worked as an apicultural researcher for the US Department of Agriculture at the USDA Carl Hayden Honeybee Research Laboratory in Tucson, Arizona. He gained extensive knowledge about bees, their behavior and characteristics through his beekeeping experiences and his work at that USDA Federal Bee Lab.

In the late 1970s, Tom Martin left the Bee Lab to do field beekeeping research for the private sector. He was hired by Arizona Bee Products. Tom Martin has worked for them ever since. Commercial beekeeping is extremely hard work, especially in Arizona. It was clear to Tom that once African honeybees crossed the Arizona border, beekeeping in Arizona would likely change forever. A progressive beekeeping company would have to be prepared to deal with this invasive, aggressive species of honeybees. As Arizona law requires a company to be a licensed pest control company in order to control any pest, the chore of becoming a pest control company was undertaken in early 1993. Hence, our company AAA Africanized Bee Removal Specialists, Inc. was founded and completed the rigorous endeavor of becoming a Licensed Pest Control Company.

African honeybees were first found in the United States in Hidalgo, Texas in 1990, where they stung and killed a man mowing his lawn on a riding mower. As United States researchers watched the African bee population expand through Mexico, it was estimated that the expansion moved approximately 200 miles a year. Using that data, it was originally estimated that African honeybees would arrive in Arizona at the Mexican border in 1995. Logically, it was felt that the first find would be near Douglas, Arizona or Sasabe, Arizona. Both of these communities are border towns with significant international traffic.

Hence, it was a shock to researchers and beekeepers alike to learn that the first colony of African honeybees found in Arizona was a colony that had become very well established in Tucson, in early June of 1993. This colony stung and killed a large dog and had become entrenched in the hollow aspect of the roof of a home on Tucson’s west side. Tom Martin, our company president, removed this colony. As this was two years earlier than expected, USDA and Arizona Department of Agriculture researchers scrambled to set out bait-trap-hives in the adjacent neighborhoods in an effort to ascertain if this was a lone colony that had perhaps “hitchhiked” noth bound on a Mexican truck, or if the natural expansion had occurred without the US and Arizona Departments of Agriculture’s detection. It was quickly concluded that this colony was not the only African colony in Tucson and surrounding areas.

Initially, Tom Martin and others in our parent company, Arizona Bee Products, believed that some, if not most of the colonies of African honeybees found could be captured and de-queened, wherein the worker bees could be integrated into individual queen-right European bee colonies. For three years, from 1993 to 1996, this procedure is what our company and parent company focused on.

Unfortunately, during this 3 year period, especially in 1996, several stinging attacks occurred from colonies of African honeybees that we saved, having integrated them into our beekeeping operation. As a result, our parent company lost numerous, long-standing beekeeping sites. Therefore, a company decision was made to cease integrating African worker bees into our colonies, and, therefore, we quit saving these colonies. To our knowledge, we were the last company in Arizona which saved these bees. At that time, we had already been exterminating colonies that had become established in structural cavities in dwellings and buildings. Our employees were then and still are very well trained beekeepers with the specialized knowledge and expertise that can only be gained through working in a real beekeeping operation. We developed extensive first-hand knowledge of the characteristics and behaviors of Africanized Honeybees, , apis mellifera scutellata.

One can easily conclude that our company individuals have a vast and detailed knowledge of beekeeping and bee extermination. We believe that the additional expertise, knowledge and thoroughness provided by our specialists more than makes up for any price difference that may initially be noted between our company and some of our competitors. We are confident that the work that we perform and the timeliness of our response to each job is worth the price we charge and that a customer’s experience with our company will always be worthwhile. If you have read this article, mention promotion code "Longhorn" and we will give you a fifty dollar cash discount off your next bee service- if you mention it before we collect payment. Please take the time to examine the rest of our website so you can have an even better understanding of the difficult nature of this business and the specialized tasks being performed by AAA Africanized Bee Removal Specialists, Inc.