Killer Bees Head East

During the 70's a plethora of B-movies - with shock-value names like "The Killer Bees" and "The Swarm" - came out with the thin storyline of "killer" honeybees breaching the borders of the United States and wreaking havoc on the general population. These movies followed the march of the bees north, usually swarming on defenseless children, the family dog, or grandma in her garden, before the protagonist finally convinced or was convinced by someone else to fight the spreading deadly menace. One of those movies, "The Savage Bees" (1976), that capitalized on people's fears of flying crawling things ended by enticing the bees to swarm around a Volkswagen Beetle, which was subsequently driven into the new (and air-conditioned) New Orleans Superdome. The city and America were saved (for awhile) by lowering the temperature to the point where the bees became dormant.

The story of the Africanized honeybee has become legend, if a bit exaggerated, over the years. Negligibly smaller than a regular honeybee, the "killer" bees were the hybrid result of cross-breeding European honeybees with more aggressive African honeybees. Escaping from a lab in 1957, the bees made their way south and north, reaching as far south as northern Argentina and crossing into the United States in Texas in 1990. They have since spread out east and west to California and to Florida.

But it is Louisiana from which the latest news of movement has come. Swarms of the Africanized bees were first discovered outside Shreveport in 2005. The Louisiana Department of Agriculture and Forestry announced that the bees have now been found just north of Alexandria, which is about 100 miles northwest of New Orleans and about the same distance due west of Natchez, Mississippi. Experts there say the bees will probably cover the state by the end of the year and cross into Mississippi in 2009.

Should we be worried? After all, they are "killer" bees.