Saturday 8 June 2013

Foreign: Texas Man Dies From Stings By Killer Bees.

A Texas man died after being attacked by a swarm of Africanized honeybees, sometimes called "killer bees." Larry Goodwin, 62, was driving a tractor near his home south of Waco when he disturbed a pile of wood that contained a hive of the notoriously aggressive bees; eight people have been killed by the bees since 1990, the Waco Tribune reports. "You can't believe how bad they are. They make me want to get out of this business," Allen Miller, owner of Bees Be Gone, who later destroyed the hive, told the Tribune. "They can get up under your clothes where no other insect can go," Miller said. "In a hive of ordinary European bees, about 10 percent will attack if the hive is threatened, but with African bees, all of them attack you."

The introduction of Africanized honeybees into the Western Hemisphere was the result of a scientific experiment gone awry, according to a Texas A&M University report. In 1956, Warwick Kerr, a honeybee geneticist with the University of São Paulo, Brazil, imported African bees (Apis mellifera scutellata) to study. His intention was to selectively introduce traits such as disease resistance and faster reproductive rate into native honeybees. But a handful of the African bees escaped into the wild, where they interbred with native bees to produce bees with traits primarily derived from their dominant African forbearers (traits of the more docile native bees tended to be recessive and therefore lost), leading to the term "Africanized honey bees."
http://news.yahoo.com/killer-bee-attack-science-explains-mans-death-195739311.html

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