Another killer bee? Africanized honey bee facts and safety tips

Africanized honey bees are an invasive hybrid species that entered the United States through Texas in the 1990s. This continued a spread that began in Brazil in the 1950s, and has continued through the present day.

This variety of bees is more defensive, less selective of nesting locations and breeds far more often than their native counterparts. Their stings are no more potent than that of a standard European honey bee, but their tendency to swarm and follow targets over great distances makes them far more dangerous.

This also makes pest control and mitigation a priority for homeowners, as any Africanized bee presence on your property can present health hazards.

Africanized honey bees were first conceived 1956, when Brazilian researchers bred African honey bees with already-native European bees. Existing varieties didn’t handle the heat well or reproduce frequently enough to produce large quantities of honey.

The original intent was to create a variety of bee that would propagate and thrive in tropical climates, but the result was a much more aggressive, or more accurately, defensive, “killer bee.”

The creation of this hybrid bee was an attempt to combine the desirable traits of both European and African species. Their introduction into…

Original source: https://www.usatoday.com/money/