Hybrid killer bee: she has 300 lives on her conscience and she cannot be stopped

The selection gave mankind many useful species of plants and animals that have the best qualities compared to their ancestors. But there are fatal mistakes in the work of scientists. The Brazilian entomologist and geneticist Warwick Kerr was engaged in breeding a new breed of bees, crossing an African bee with various European breeds. In the process of experiments, hybrids accidentally ended up outside the laboratory and have already caused the death of at least 300 people, and thousands of animals have already killed their animals.

The idea of creating a hybrid based on an African bee was very good. An order for breeding a new species came from Brazilian beekeepers who wanted to grow more productive insects. An African bee has a number of useful properties compared to others: it tolerates heat, collects almost twice as much honey, is more resistant to diseases and reproduces better. Warwick Kerr brought them from Africa and started crossbreeding. Now it’s hard to say how this happened, but in 1957 the hybrids obtained were free. And then events developed like in a Hollywood horror movie.

Females of Africanized hybrids began to interbreed with drones of ordinary bees. The result is offspring that meet all the desires of Brazilian beekeepers, except for one "but." These hybrids turned out to be extremely aggressive and larger in size. They attack anyone who comes closer than 5 meters to their house, and then chases a fleeing victim up to a kilometer away, and this usually ends with the death of an inattentive passerby.

But, as it turned out, they show aggression not only to protect their home, in 1967 the most massive case of the attack of these insects on houses in one of the areas of Rio de Janeiro was recorded. Rescuers who arrived at the scene were unable to do anything. The bees were scared away by a flamethrower, but this only increased their aggression, which killed 150 people and several hundred animals. Since then, reports of the human victims of these killer bees have been appearing regularly; in Brazil alone, their number has already “exceeded” 300. And it’s impossible to count dead animals and domestic animals, but, according to experts, there are already several thousand of them. It turned out that the poison of these bees is superior to the poison of ordinary bees in toxicity, hence the great number of victims as a result of anaphylactic shock.

Over a short period of time, these "improved" bees, due to their high productivity and adaptive abilities, spread throughout South America, crowding out their more modest relatives. They turned out to be very hardworking and capable of collecting large amounts of honey, but on occasion attacked domestic bees and, ruining the hives, stole honey from them. Argentina, Venezuela, Panama, Mexico and many other countries fell victim to this aggressive bee hybrid. Moving further to the north of the American continent, they reached the borders of the United States, in the southern part of which, despite the quarantine measures of the country's authorities, they regularly record cases of their occurrence. Neither hot deserts nor tropical showers frighten insects, and in the New World there is only one country left whose inhabitants are not yet familiar with the new miracle of genetics. It is located in northern Canada. It was low temperatures that slowed the triumphal march of killer bees across the continent in recent times, and they were stuck somewhere in the US state of California.

Let's hope that this eerie example of creating killer bees instead of a more profitable honey bee will serve humanity as a lesson, and most importantly, that these terrible insects will not reach our continent. This is perhaps the rare case when you can be glad that Rio de Janeiro is so far from us.