'Killer Bees' Abated After Swarming Concord Neighborhood

Answering a reporter's call on Sunday, Contra Costa County beekeeper Norman Lott was asked if he was the man who had come face to face with an angry swarm of honeybees in Concord over the weekend.

"Butt to face is more like it," Lott said, referring to the fact the bees stung him repeatedly on Saturday as he tried to help contain the swarm.

The insects, which Lott and others say they believe to be hybridized "killer" bees known for their ferocious defensive behavior, were mostly eradicated by Sunday.

The killer bee episode began Friday, when a man living on the 3800 block of Hitchcock Drive tried to move a hive in his backyard. The bees responded aggressively to defend the hive -- a hallmark of the hybridized bees that are believed to have descended from a 1956 effort in Brazil to cross European honeybees with honeybees from southern Africa.

The bees fanned out from the backyard after the hive was disturbed, killing two small dogs in an adjacent yard and stinging people in the area. The resident of the Hitchcock Drive home reportedly responded by removing the hive from which the aggressive bees had emerged. Lott said that only made matters worse because, "without a queen to cluster to," the angry bees were left roaming in the area.

Saturday, bee attacks in the neighborhood were widespread enough that Concord police told residents to stay indoors and advised motorists driving through the area to keep their windows rolled up. Saturday night, most of the remaining hybridized bees were doused with soapy water, killing them, after they returned to the site of their former hive. By Sunday, the bee attacks were pretty much over.

Lott kept several of the dead bees for DNA analysis, the only sure way of distinguishing the hybridized bees from their closely related domestic cousins.

The possible appearance of the hybridized bees in Concord isn't a complete surprise. After emerging in Brazil in the late 1950s, the aggressive honeybees arrived in Texas in 1990 and reached Southern California in 1994. Last fall, researchers from UC San Diego who have been following the insects' northward progress through the state announced they had found the hybrid bees outside Lafayette, near Briones Regional Park. The researchers also found hybridized bees at two places in eastern Solano County.

Lott said the aggressive bees pose a new challenge for beekeepers, who he said need to be vigilant in observing the behavior of their hives.

"The only way to control their spread would be recognizing these bees, eradicating them or thinning out that bad DNA" by replacing the queens in an aggressive hive, Lott said.

Lott, who's in his mid-60s, said he's been raising bees in and near Concord since he was 10 years old. The hybridized bees, he said, are just the latest challenge for Bay Area beekeepers.

Domestic honeybees have been beset by what a 2012 study called "numerous pathogens and parasites," leading to a phenomenon called colony collapse disorder and leading to a widespread shortage of bees for pollinating crops in California and elsewhere.

"When I was a kid growing up in Concord, being a beekeeper was easy, so easy," Lott said. "No diseases to worry about. They requeened themselves. It's totally different now."