Risk and expense in dealing with bees too much for beekeepers

Thick leather gloves don’t stand a chance against Africanized bees.

Attempting almost a month ago to extract Africanized queen bees from 120 hives that had been abandoned for two years in San Saba, commercial beekeeper Bill Vanderput’s hands were stung at least 50 times through his gloves.

It was only last week that his left hand, still red at the site of the stings, began to feel normal again.

“I had never had anything like that happen,” said Vanderput, a 30-year beekeeper and owner of Magic Valley Honey and Pollination in Pharr.

It is occurrences like these, Vanderput says, that keep beekeepers — commercial and hobbyists alike — from dealing with the hostile insect altogether, especially for pollination at local farms.

William Rubink, a former research entomologist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture honey bee research unit in Weslaco, said the risk and expense in dealing with Africanized bees is often too much for a lot of beekeepers.

“They need a lot of equipment to the point where people don’t want to work with them,” Rubink said. “Dealing with bees themselves and the diseases requires constant attention. To reduce and kill diseases gets expensive.”

Adding that together makes Africanized bees an unpopular way to make money when it comes to pollination services for farmers or even selling the honey the bees produce, Rubink said.

The bees are so combative, they are more resistant to the diseases that are killing other bees in large numbers, Rubink and Vanderput said.

“In that respect, they’re making a contribution,” to local agriculture, Vanderput joked.

What makes these bees so aggressive is that they’re always on their guard, he said.

“They make a big impression with their ‘shock and awe’ presentation that they’re specialists at when they attack,” Vanderput said. “ ‘Nuisance bees’ is what we should call them.”

Because these bees can be quick to attack, coupled with the risk they present to beekeepers, the general public and field workers, beekeepers are pretending Africanized bees don’t even exist.

“They’re not going to go anywhere,” Vanderput said. “They’re landed immigrants; they have their green card. Just ignore them.”

Rubink, who lives in Edinburg, said he rarely approaches his Africanized beehives.

These bees are more active, they move quicker and they might be better pollinators than European bees, Rubink said.

Although they’re productive bees, Africanized bees have no effect on local agriculture, Rubink and Vanderput said. Vanderput said the only use his colonies of Africanized bees serve are for honey production, but even that isn’t much.

The Valley has never been a good area for honey production, Vanderput said. His African bees can produce about 40 pounds of honey per colony, while his brother, a beekeeper in Winnipeg, Canada, can have 200 pounds of honey in each colony.

“If it wasn’t for pollination services for the farms, I wouldn’t be here,” Vanderput said. “I wouldn’t survive.”

European bees, by instinct, always prepare for a cold winter by hoarding honey and not using it all until the end of the season, which makes them better for honey production. In contrast, Africanized bees are more careless, Vanderput said.

“They’re spoiled by living in tropical areas,” he said.

The Africanized bee population here is slowly getting smaller with bees moving north toward Victoria and around Houston in Texas and toward Arizona and California. In order to decrease the number of African bee colonies Vanderput has — currently about 2,000 — he has begun using European queen bees to breed a bee that is not as aggressive.

But when it comes to pollination services — for watermelon, cantaloupes, honeydew, melon and pickling cucumbers — Vanderput and his employees are sent to farms all over the Valley and the state where they use European bees.

There may be other beekeepers across the state that are contracted by farmers to come into the Valley with Africanized bees, but for Vanderput, safety is first.

“You couldn’t do it with African bees,” he said of pollinating. “There’s no telling what could happen to people out there. You can’t afford to have an African bee on that load.”