Subject: KILLER BEE HYPE

From: [email-masked] (Andy Nachbaur)
Date: Thu, 4 Apr 1996 18:39:00 GMT

The Hype of the Killer Bee's (EXPOSED)

Many years ago now when the killer bee was made infamous by several
sci-fi movies and much hype by American Bee Scientists interested in
gaining grants to study them, our local TV station did a series on
them by sending a crew to Mexico to film them live and first hand.

I recorded these programs so I could show them to other beekeepers
who would drop by for visits and passing the gas on beekeeping.
By accident I stoped one of these tapes of bees stinging animals
and to my complete surprise the poor chicken that was being stung by
the killer bees was tied up by a string attached to its leg in front
of the hive. I should not have been surprised as I had learned at a
young age the Walt Disney did not film the Living Desert and purchased
it from a young film maker who did and used captive and trapped
animals to do it.

Anyway a few days ago I found a text file on the internet put up
by a writer who has for years specialized in hyping the Killer Bees
and has written numerous articles, a book, and even tried his hand
at marketing Killer Bee Honey. Do a text search for BUZZ or Killer
Bees, or Bees and have a look for yourself, or you can request the
text version from me at:  [email-masked]  its about 25k in
size.

What you will find in this text is information on how it was done
to us....
-----------------EDITED AND OUT OF CONTEXT-------------------

               MY LIFE WITH THE KILLER BEES

For nearly twenty years, I've watched as the killer bees made their way north.
Now they're in California. So am I.

  By Ed Zukerman

   Sometime this year, when the flowers are blooming and the nectar is
   flowing, a wild bee colony will prosper to the point of overcrowding.
   The bees will take appropriate action.

   And the first colony of killer bees will fly into Los Angeles.

   For the bees, this will be just another minor milestone on a journey
   that began thirty-eight years ago and more than six thousand miles
   away. It will be the latest chapter in one of the great biological
   success stories of the century -- the overrunning of much of a
   hemisphere by a handful of imported insects. It is a tale of pitiless
   natural selection, and of some very nasty deaths.

   It is also the story of my life.

   I was less amused to read, as I flew southward toward my first
   encounter with killer bees, the following eyewitness account in
   National Geographic:

   "Suddenly hundreds, thousands of bees appeared. Dr. Eglantina ran, but
   she had a lame leg. She tripped and fell into a ditch. She crawled

 But it was too late."

   It was with some trepidation that I debarked in Cayenne, the capital
   of French Guiana,

   I had come to this peculiar place to meet Professor Orley R. "Chip"
   Taylor Jr., a University of Kansas entomologist who was studying the
   killer bees with several enthusiastic graduate students.
   Guiana. There wasn't much else to do.

   Her name was Connie, and she was wearing a sundress, and she was
   remarkably casual, I thought, when she led me to the backyard to show
   me several wooden bee hives brimming with killer bees. I stopped
   twenty feet away. "It's all right," she said. "They're gentle." I
   nodded and returned to the living room. She followed me in, picked up
   her afghan, and told me how, in her husband's absence, neighbors had
   recently notified her and another grad student's wife of an errant
   killer bee swarm, and that the two women had gone out and captured it
   in a butterfly net. "We've seen the guys do it so many times that we
   know how,"

   Over the next few days, I watched the bee researchers sort through
   more colonies bare-handed, placidly absorbing stings as they looked
   for individual bees onto whose backs they had glued tiny numbers. I
   watched a column of army ants attack a colony of killer bees (the bees
   won, with a little help from the graduate students). I checked into a
   local hotel under the name Green Brown (the clerk misread my
   passport). And I was attacked by forty thousand killer bees.

*   The attack was provoked on purpose, for the benefit of a visiting
*   film crew from the United States Department of Agriculture, and
*   everybody, even the graduate students, dressed for the occasion

   the hive opening, casually going about their business. Chip looked at
   them skeptically. "They're not going to do anything," he said. "I'm
   sure of it."

   He tried to rile them anyway. When the camera started to roll, Chip
   pried off the hive's entrance plates with a machete. Bee defenders
   flew up to attack him. The cameraman asked Chip to hold up a chamois
   leather target he'd prepared as part of the attack demonstration, but
   it was already too late. Though the cameraman was standing only a few
   feet away, Chip could not hear him. The outraged buzzing of the bees
   around his head was too loud.

   Chip whacked the bee box with his machete, and the bees went totally
   insane, engulfing us all in the distinctive angry buzz of bees on the
   attack and the slightly putrid odor of the chemical signal they
   release to summon their comrades. The bees circled our heads and
   bounced off our veils, trying to get to our faces. More than a hundred
   bees were bouncing off my veil alone, just inches from my eyes, where
   they would have dearly loved to sink their stingers. Others climbed
   over my suit, trying to edge into the gaps I'd taped up.

   In 1985, several colonies of killer bees, stowaways on a ship from
   South America, were found near Bakersfield, California. They were
   promptly destroyed, and no others were found (the killer bee front
   line was then in Nicaragua), but this precursor of the inevitable
   killer bee invasion of the United States put the bees in the headlines
   again.

   In 1989, the killer bees were well established in Mexico, on the
   doorstep of Texas at last. Another magazine sent me off to do another
   killer bee article.

   In the Mexican city of Jalapa, I was reunited with Prof. Orley R.
   "Chip" Taylor, whom I hadn't seen since French Guiana twelve years
   before

   I spent a week in Mexico, and it was all fairly interesting.

   I drove around with two Mexican employees of a half-baked U.S.
   government program designed to stop the killer bees from reaching the
   United States. Pablo and Manuel traveled in a white Dodge pickup,
   checking empty bee boxes they'd set out on rural roads to see if
   they'd been occupied by migrating killer bee swarms. If they had,
   Pablo and Manuel would kill the bees with soap and water. In fifteen
   months, they had killed thirty killer bee colonies. The program, Chip
   said, was about as effective as stepping on ants.

*  The big moment of the trip, as in French Guiana years before, was a
*  mass bee attack deliberately provoked for the benefit of a visiting
*  film crew (this time from a PBS science show). Once again, however,
*  this was not the big moment for me.

   "Tell me again why you do this," I asked Chip.

   "It gives intense sexual pleasure," he shouted back, as the nearly two
   million bees of the apiary tried to kill him -- and me. "It's a
   secret. We don't tell anybody."

   Ho ho ho. I'd had enough.
   Enough was enough.

   1995 by Buzz Inc. -- All rights reserved

-----------Read the full text-----much left out--------------------

 Yes, he has had enough....when will we admit the same?  If I myself
had not been lucky enough to meet one on one with many of the
participants of the "killer bee hype", the same people Mr. Zuckerman
writes about I would not be the cynic I am today when it comes to
American Bee Science (bs).. So many people have been taken in by
the false prophets of doom, including some very responsible government
regulators, you can be sure that the USDA will never admit they were
wrong, same as they have not admitted that they also were taken in
on controlling any other bee problems by quarantines and search and
destroy mission that ruined the lives of several innocent beekeepers
and cost the bee industry and tax payers millions of dollars.

                            ttul Andy-

(c) Permission is granted to freely copy this document
in any form, or to print for any use.

(w)Opinions are not necessarily facts. Use at own risk.

---
 þ QMPro 1.53 þ ... Barbs has it, like a bee.