Welcome...and initial guidelines...

This blog will be used in the spring of 2008 by 80+ students at Drexel University to investigate the effects of Iraq on culture and the reverse. Our goal will be to better understand why the US is in Iraq, and to question whether literature can help us on this journey.

Weekly plans and other materials will always be posted in Vista, not this blog. So go to Bb Vista to get the discussion prompts and other instructions.

I intend this blog to manage our discussions and track our collective investigation.

You should have received an email from me inviting you to become a contributor to this blog. The email was sent Monday afternoon to your official Drexel email address.

Thursday, April 10, 2008

Killer Bee's !

I remember the Killer Bee scare... kind of.

The Africanized Honey Bees, or "Killer Bees" as they are called were accidentally released by a careless beekeeper in Brazil of 1957. This didn't cause much of a scare throughout the United States for many years. All the way up till they came into our territory. It wasn't until October, 1990 when these hybrid honey bees were first spotted and trapped in Texas.

How do these Bee's differ so much from African or Honey Bees?
They are smaller, but only an expert can tell the difference
Defend their hive more rapidly than the European honey bee
Usually sting in greater numbers
Are less selective about where they nest
Swarm more often than European honey bees
(http://www.desertusa.com/mag98/sep/stories/kbees.html)

Basically, you don't want to piss them off.

The first case of an attack in the U.S. was in May of 1991. I man was riding on his lawnmower and was then swarmed. He was stung 18 times but was able to be treated in the hospital successfully. The first case of someone dieing from these Killer Bees was in Texas in July of '93. 82 year old, Lino Lopez was trying to remove a colony from a wall in an abandon building on his property. He was stung 40 times, must have been a painful way to go.

So we got these swarm of Killer Bees making their way more and more north in the U.S. This should cause a scare... right? Well the idea of swarms of what looks like honey bees chasing me the length of a quarter of a mile because I was too loud would scare the hell out me.

Only problem about the scare, is that, the bee's are "Africanized Honey Bees" They're not used to cold winters. They couldn't travel as far up the U.S. as people originally thought.

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