The insects seem to have reached the area by ship

Jan 9, 2007 14:44 GMT  ·  By

As if Katrina had not been enough, the residents of flood-damaged St. Bernard Parish, New Orleans, still recovering from hurricane devastation, have to face a new menace: killer bees.

A team of agriculturalists have started setting traps around a half-mile radius of a storm-wrecked home Monday that authorities have confirmed was infested with aggressive Africanized honey bees.

The bees, also named "killer bees," drove away contractors hired to tear down a house in Arabi, a St. Bernard Parish community that borders New Orleans.

Then, they drove off beekeepers called in to catch them, being finally destroyed by mosquito workers.

"The state agriculture department confirmed in late December that they were hybrids with the aggressive African strain," said Bob Odom, Agriculture and Forestry Commissioner.

The traps are to determine if more Africanized bees are swarming in the area.

"The same type of traps are already used to monitor the progression of the bees in the western part of Louisiana," where first killer bees were found in 2005.

"So far, this is an isolated find in the New Orleans area," Odom said.

"The bees probably did not come overland," Jimmy Dunkley, the department's coordinator of nursery and apiary programs.

"The bees probably were descendants of stowaways who arrived in New Orleans on a ship", added Dunkley.

"Nine swarms have been intercepted at state ports since 1988: ix in New Orleans, two in Baton Rouge and one, this past October, at the Port of New Iberia. Some were in shipping containers, some in barges, and some in the ships themselves," Dunkley said.

Africanized bees are the result of an intent carried out in 1957 in Brazil to increase honey production.

Aggressive bees, brought from Tanzania, escaped and started to move progressively towards north.

Killer queens eliminate common European bees and the offspring resulted turn out to be as aggressive as the African progenitors.

These reached Texas in 1990 and have spread west to California (till Santa Barbara) and east to western Louisiana.

They are called "killer bees" because of an extremely aggressive and defensive behavior, being implied in some deadly cases.