Bees with an attitude
Africanized honey bees are very aggressive in defending the hive, to them it does not matter if the threat is two legged or four legged. When the bees establish a hive, they also establish boundari...
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navigator wrote:
When the bees establish a hive, they also establish boundaries of defense, and knowing the subtle warnings can save you from a nasty sting or several more.
VERY interesting writeup. Thanks. We've always had in the back of our minds the 'what if" we ever encountered Africanized bees when exploring in the Southwest US.
To the best of my knowledge, only honeybees that carry isozymes, mitochondrial DNA, and morphometric traits (all three) can be classified as Africanized. And the approximate most northerly range of bees carrying all three traits is the Humboldt National Forest area in Nevada; the Yosemite National Park region CA; the Pecos Wilderness area of NM; the Tonkawa area of Oklahoma; and in Florida, west coast Spring Hill to east coast Merritt Island National Seashore latitudes (occasionally, central Georgia, but rarely) . These northerly range extremes shouldn't be gospel, but rough northern ranges of the purest genetic Africanized strain....
If we go into remote areas south of central Florida (and, when we explored any distance more than maybe appx 1000 feet from our truck camper in the Southwest), we always had on bug suit jackets. This is one of my special bug suits when I was collecting ticks potentially infected with Lyme disease carrying parasites, last August in Long island, in 97F temperatures, 80% humidity. I normally wear a "boonie" hat under the head-gear that tents the material well away from my face and neck. This face net actually unzips for ventilation:
