That's a bunch of 1970s media hype. Most bees in the southern United States have some of the African subspecies mixed in with them. Apis mellifera scutellata differs only from the kinds of hybrids that were here in that, when the colony is threatened, a larger percentage of the workers come out to fight. Honeybees are not really aggressive buggers by nature no matter what subspecies.Fife wrote: Sun Jul 14, 2019 3:03 pm BTW are there any Africanized honey bees to speak of up in the mountains now, or are they still all down in the coastal swamps?
While pretty much all our honeybees are hybrids in North America, here in the higher latitudes of the Southland the predominant subspecies is Italian (apis mellifera ligustica). They are more golden in color.
I just read through the Wikipedia entry for these things, and it has some serious bullshit in parts of it. I would not read that shit.