Episode Six: Killer Bees

 Episode Summary: The killer bees are coming. Can they be stopped?

Bike Summary: 2.6 miles, 134 calories

An excellent episode capitalizing on the popular panic about Africanized honey bees being super-aggressive and deadly -- as well as LIVE BEE INSEMINATION.

Despite clearly being built on the panic, the episode was factual and even tried to downplay the bees, to the point where it sounded like bee propaganda. Nimoy says "Killer bees deserve our respect" in a way that sounds almost ingratiating, eg, "I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords."

This follows a number of shots of a man in a beekeeper suit deliberately aggravating a hive, which result in him and the camera man being chased for some time and even traditional tools like smoke don't calm them down. 

We also get our first look at bee biology, as Nimoy voices over the life of the hive, with fertile queens, specialized drones and how eggs are stored in special cells and emerge as fully formed adults, which I did not know. 

He then described how the bees were created. European honey bees were dandy and benign, having been brought to the New World deliberately for their honey and wax production. But African honey bees fascinated apiologists, because although bigger and more aggressive and territorial, they were also much more productive. "A harsh, nomadic race," Nimoy called them.

Anyways, in Sao Paulo, Brazil, researchers wanted to see if they could breed a better bee, combining the productivity of the African bee with the tranquility of the European. In other words, as all great b movies start, "They tampered in God's domain."

The show then goes back to being a straight documentary as Nimoy discusses further breeding to try to dilute the bees' aggression. As a result, we see a scientist squeeze a bee to extract semen and then artificially insemenate a queen. There are also scenes of a scientist performing what I believe is a vivisection on a bee because that was the only way to tell the different bees apart. 

Then we go back to the beekeeper, Dr Norman Gary, who talks about and then demonstrates the different ways to make the bees angry. According to In Search Of, killing just one can bring out a swarm bent on removing the threat, but they also show how motorized farm equipment angers them, or how they'll build a hive in a rotted log or hollow stump, which a farmer then chains saws through in preparation of removing it, setting them off. In his beekeeper's vail, Gary also showed how the bees fiercely attack things colored black, in Gary's case a patch of leather attached to his suit, which quickly had dozens of stings in it. Goths will also therefore be at high risk. 

Finally Nimoy discusses how the bees are on their way, expected to arrive in the US in 1990 and how some plans to stop them include building a net across the Panama Canal -- "We'll build a hive and make the bees pay for it."

Podcast summary:

Jeb and Blake described this as "Kind of almost not an episode of In Search Of" because of its factual nature. Jeb talked about how the whole idea of the "Killer bees are coming" is partially a real thing and a partially a cultural anxiety. They mention of a bunch of "killer insect" films, including "The Swarm" from 1974 and two MST3K films, The Beginning of the End and The Deadly Mantis (they also did 1967's The Deadly Bees). Jeb said that, since he does archeological work in Central America, he has met people who have been stung by Africanized bees and if you're not allergic to bees, you can develop an allergy if you're stung enough times. (Some people even think beestings or bee venom can be therapeutic.)

He also talked about how people in Central America have been keeping bees -- and there are native American stingless bees -- for about 2,000 years, using traditional methods where the bees are kept in logs. This method is dying out because the American bee doesn't produce as much honey as either the European or Africanized bees (interestingly, I was looking up stuff on Wikipedia related to this episode and according to it, the African bee that was used in the hybridization attempts was the East African Lowland Honey Bee. This bee itself is under threat in southern Africa, by the Cape Honey Bee. Basically, the Cape Honey Bee has female workers capable of reproducing parthenogenetically and when they come across colonies of the East African Lowland Bees, they resemble queens so much they don't get recognized as invaders, so they get to eat the colonies' food without contributing to it and eventually the host colony queen starves to death and the colony dies).

They discussed what podcasting would be like if they had to dance to communicate the way bees do and Norman Gary's film career -- he's now who Hollywood turns to when they need bees.

Jeb also says "Do not want" to radioactive wasps from the Hanford, Washington nuclear site. Blake, who is from the South, says that because of climate change hornets and yellow jacket nests aren't dying during the winter, but are forming huge multi-year nests. Yellow jackets are bad news, but hopefully the kudzu will take care of things. 

Whole moral of this episode might be that humans mess up accidentally bringing new plants and animals across continents, but deliberately doing that is somehow even worse.