When will killer bees reach Kansas?

Killer bees have been found within a few miles of Kansas. If not already here, they could be soon.

Experts say Kansans needn’t panic even though these are the same kind of bees that killed a 77-year-old Californian last week, stinging him more than 600 times. In Arizona and California several pets as large as full-grown horses have been killed by the bees this summer. Several years ago an Arizona outdoorsman was stung about 1,500 times, but survived.

Twice the bees have been found a few miles south of the Oklahoma/Kansas border. There’s a solid and stable population of the bees in the southwest quarter of Oklahoma.

“They’re in good numbers down there. I’ve taken students down there three times and found them all three times, the same dearly beloved killer bees everybody knows,” said Orley “Chip” Taylor, a University of Kansas professor who began studying the bees in 1974. “They are retaining most of the traits of the ones we found in Africa.”

While Oklahoma has had no fatalities, state officials say several people have been hospitalized, including one woman who had about 1,000 stings.

Because of the climate Taylor doesn’t think Kansas will ever sustain large populations of the bees.

“Even if, or when, they get to Kansas I don’t see them as a very serious threat,” Taylor said. “For several reasons I think the number of colonies would be small, and the possibilities of human encounters probably much smaller than in other states like California.”

Science experiment gone bad

What the public now knows as killer bees came from Africa to Brazil in 1950, brought over by a biologist hoping the new species would do better in the Brazilian tropics than regular European honey bees. In 1957, 26 swarms escaped and began moving northward at up to 200 miles per year. They moved into Texas in 1990 and New Mexico and Arizona in 1993. They announced themselves in a very painful way.

“We discovered them in Arizona when we had a stinging incident. We started looking then and found others,” said Gloria DeGrandi-Hoffman of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s bee research facility in Tucson. “That’s not uncommon. You have an incident, start looking and find other established populations in your area. We now have them from the Sonora Desert all the way up to Flagstaff (about 6,900 feet) and up into Nevada and Utah. They’ve proven to be surprisingly adaptable. It’s been interesting.”

Africanized bees, as scientists call them, spread across Texas rapidly and entered Oklahoma in 2004. By the end of the next year they were found in about all counties in the southwestern portion of the state. Since then their spread northward has been slower and more sporadic, according to information from the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture. The two sightings a few miles below southwest Kansas seem isolated from other populations.

The 2013 find in Harper County, Okla., just south of Ashland, may have been natural spread or brought to the area by a beekeeper. The bees found in 2014 in Woods County, Okla., just south of Coldwater, were believed to have arrived on their own. But that doesn’t mean other swarms haven’t been close to, or even in, Kansas.

“Nobody has really done a lot of (research) with African bees for quite a while, maybe 10 years or more,” DeGrandi-Hoffman said. “By then we’d learned about everything we needed to know to address any problems.”

Bad news bees

No matter their zip code, Africanized bees have much in common with European honey bees, which were brought to America in the 1600s. Don Molner, a retired Oklahoma Department of Agriculture bee specialist, said the two species look almost identical. The same can be said for the potency of their sting.

“Their sting is like a regular honey bee. You can’t tell the difference at all,” Molner said. “The difference is the number of bees that come at you at one time with the Africanized honey bees. We had the one woman get stung about 1,000 times. We’ve had several people get stung hundreds of times.”

Most swarms are made of hybridized bees with both European and African ancestry.

Africanized bees also can live in large numbers. One nest in Arizona was estimated at 800,000 bees, and each of those bees is as protective of the nest as a mother grizzly of her young cubs.

“It’s not like they’re going out looking for people to sting,” DeGrandi-Hoffman said. “But problems arise when somebody stumbles along and disturbs a nest.”

An online search provided instances of severe attacks when someone felled a tree that held a nest, or while an old house or barn with a nest was being torn down. In February a young boy in Arizona was stung more than 400 times after he shot a BB gun at an old car holding an unseen nest of Africanized bees.

Angery African bees also press their attack farther and longer than their European cousins. They’ve been known to follow people, or animals, a quarter-mile from their disturbed nest.

Still, Taylor and DeGrandi-Hoffman say most people find ways to escape an Africanized bee onslaught.

“Most healthy people can out run them, at least enough,” DeGrandi-Hoffman said. “No doubt you’ll take a few stings, but you probably won’t have enough to even put you in the hospital or be life-threatening.”

The best defense is to head to an enclosed area, like within a vehicle or a house, where the bees can’t follow. Many of those seriously injured were elderly who couldn’t run to shelter. DeGrandi-Hoffman said rock climbers are especially vulnerable. Several had died directly from Africanized bee stings. Some have died from falls as they tried to escape a swarm. Media reports say the Arizona man stung 1,500 times was a rock climber who was stung over a three-hour period, mostly while stranded above the ground because of a jammed knot.

DeGrandi-Hoffman recommends that climbers, hikers, hunters and about anybody else spending time outdoors pay attention and look for places where insects may be coming in and out of a hole of some kind. She’s recommended rock climbers use binoculars to check their vertical path before they make a climb.

Many of the animals, from small dogs to horses, that have died were confined to a pen or on a chain, which made escape impossible.

Prompt medical attention has probably saved dozens of Americans from dying from Africanized bee attacks, which can inject fatal amounts of venom if the victim is not treated. Taylor said some victims have suffered heart attacks. Others have had major kidney problems as their organs tried to filter out that much poison.

Can it happen in Kansas?

While it’s possible Kansas could someday have such horrible attacks, Taylor sees the odds as slim compared with other states. Things like drought and a lack of continually-flowering plants could work against the Africanized bees if they enter into southwest Kansas, the area with the highest likelihood of an invasion because of the bee populations in Oklahoma and the Texas panhandle.

Unlike the densely populated areas of California and Arizona, sparsely populated southwest Kansas would make the chances of human/bee contacts slim, said Taylor.

Kansas Africanized bee populations would probably be cyclic, based on weather patterns, Taylor said. Several years of ideal conditions with plenty of moisture and flowering plants, and the bees could expand northward from Oklahoma. One year of severe drought, and they’d all die.

“We get a lot of species that do that,” Taylor said. “Conditions are good so they expand their range, and then they get pushed back when when those conditions change. It’s not unusual.”

DeGrandi-Hoffman sees no need for Kansans to worry, even if Africanized bees do take up permanent residence in Kansas.

“I think people need to be aware of what could happen, but they also need to look at the stats. How many (people) get killed every year in the country? Less than five,” she said. “They’re just one more thing you need to avoid. In Kansas you have rattlesnakes, you have mosquitoes ticks and chiggers. When they come, then you’d also have Africanized bees on that list. People would just have to keep their head in the game. It really wouldn’t be that big of a deal.”

This story was originally published August 4, 2017 at 6:03 PM with the headline "When will killer bees reach Kansas?."