Did You Hear The One About The Stowaway Killer Bees?

Residents of St. Bernard Parish, a flood-damaged area of Louisiana survived Hurricane Katrina but now they’re facing the danger of a different kind of storm: killer bees.

Late last December Louisiana state agriculture authorities confirmed that a house ruined by the violent hurricane was the new squatting place of a dangerous strain of Africanized honeybees. The contractors tearing down the house were first to find them, and the first to be driven away. Beekeepers were called in to capture the hybrid bees, but the aggressive insects chased them off too. Mosquito workers were finally able to kill the majority of the swarm, and on Monday, Agriculturalists lined a half-mile radius around the area with traps in an attempt to round up the remaining bees. The purpose of the traps is to determine if there are killer bees still at large and if they are traveling to different areas. “So far,” says Bob Odom, the state’s Agriculture and Forestry Commissioner, “this is and isolated find in the New Orleans area.”

The department’s coordinator of nursery and apiary programs, Jimmy Dunkley, theorizes that the bees arrived in New Orleans as stowaways on a ship. Since 1988, according to Dunkley, authorities have intercepted nine swarms at state ports, finding the bees in barges, shipping containers, and even in the ships themselves.

In 1957 a swarm of small but aggressive bees escaped from a lab in Brazil and went north. A result of a honey production experiment, the Africanized bees from the lab mated with their native counterparts and created a new hybrid strain that was just as aggressive as the ones that escaped. These bees are usually referred to as “killer bees” because their sting can be fatal.

Killer bees have been around for a while. It seems like they’ve been threatening to attack my whole life. Perhaps they were the groundbreakers in the animal kingdom’s revolution against humans.

I’m telling you, there’s something going on with them thar animals!

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3. Did You Hear The One About The Swine Gang?
4. Did You Hear The One About The Hermaphrodite Deer?