The Swarm That Chases You A Quarter Mile
Africanized 'killer' bees are no more venomous than ordinary honeybees, but they attack ten times faster, sting in ten times the numbers, and chase for a quarter of a mile. They have killed around a thousand people since escaping a Brazilian lab in 1957.
Killer Bees: Why the Swarm Never Stops
Africanized honey bees — the “killer bees” of headlines — carry exactly the same venom as the honeybees in a garden hive. What makes them deadly is not what is in the sting. It is how many stings you receive, and how far they will follow you to deliver them.
Escaped in 1957
The strain was created in Brazil in 1956, when researchers tried to cross the European honeybee with an African subspecies to breed a bee better suited to the tropics. In 1957, more than twenty swarms escaped quarantine. They bred with local bees and spread through South and Central America at more than 200 miles a year, reaching Texas in 1990 and continuing across the southern United States.
Ten Times Faster, Ten Times More Stings
Compared with European honeybees, Africanized colonies respond to a disturbance around ten times faster and in far greater numbers. Victims typically receive ten times as many stings. The trigger is chemical: each sting releases an alarm pheromone that recruits more bees from the colony, so an attack escalates on its own.
A Quarter Mile Chase
An ordinary hive gives up quickly. Africanized bees will pursue a person for a quarter of a mile — hundreds of metres — which is far enough to exhaust someone running for cover. The Natural History Museum estimates that around 1,000 stings could kill an adult, and the strain has caused roughly a thousand human deaths since it escaped.
Each Bee Dies After One Sting
The paradox is that every bee that stings pays with its life. A honeybee’s barbed stinger tears out of its body when it stings, and the bee dies. A killer bee attack is therefore thousands of individual, fatal decisions — a colony that will spend itself to drive off a threat, and will keep doing so for a quarter of a mile.
