all the buzz on the B-movie baddies
BY Vanessa Milne
When “killer bees” started heading north toward the United States more than 50 years ago, they brought with them mass panic and Bmovies, embedding their fearsome little stingers in the North American cultural imagination.
The bees, which were bred in Brazil, are a combination of the European honeybee we are all familiar with and a more aggressive African species. Designed for warm climates, the Africanized bees did produce more honey, as planned, but they were also so dangerous that they had to be kept in special cages. When, in 1957, some bees escaped and migrated northward, you couldn’t have made up a better scary story—and with an average travel rate of less than a kilometre per day, the bee narrative dragged on for decades.
By the 1970s, killer bees were the stars of B-movies and fear-mongering documentaries. North Americans were told that the creatures, eight times more likely to sting than a regular bee and apt to swarm any perceived threat, would soon be arriving in our backyards, terrorizing guests at our pool parties. Overamped movies such as The Swarm and Terror Out of the Sky made killer bees a joke. Punchlines included an X-Files episode where killer bees were messengers for aliens, and the 1998 album Wu-Tang Killa Bees: The Swarm.
When the flying fear factories finally reached the U.S. border in 1990, they did not live up to the hype. As of 2005, Africanized bees had killed only 14 people in America—low even by animal standards—and it looks as if they have stopped moving north. Most are south of Arkansas, mainly staying within Texas. The exception is New Orleans, which can’t catch a break and was declared infested last fall. Those tearing down Katrina-ravaged houses may find killer bees inside.
The bees have never reached Canada and it’s likely our inhospitable winters will continue to keep them at bay—their inability to withstand cold is one theory as to why they’re staying south. Another is that their breeding with European bees has produced a mellower offspring. Whatever the reason, our pool parties are safe … for now.
