COLLEGE STATION – Tarrant County has been added to the state quarantine, restricting the movement of commercial bee operations following the detection of Africanized honey bees there.
The addition makes 120 counties in Texas now quarantined for Africanized honey bees, according to Paul Jackson, chief inspector for the Texas Apiary Inspection Service, a unit of the Texas Agricultural Experiment Station.
Bees were collected from a tree by a Girl Scout camp near Pelican Bay in the northwestern part of the county. The hive apparently had been there several months.
"A sample was collected and sent to Texas A&M's Honey Bee Identification Lab where it was confirmed as Africanized," Jackson said.
It was determined that the bees had arrived on their own, Jackson explained, so the county was quarantined.
State bee inspectors continue to monitor a series of bee traplines that extend across the state from Louisiana to New Mexico, Jackson noted.
The Africanized bee was first detected entering the United States near Brownsville in October 1990. Since then, the bee has spread through much of the state, along a line roughly from south of Houston to south of Lubbock to El Paso. Africanized honey bees also have been found in Arizona, California and New Mexico.
Counties included in the quarantine are: Aransas, Atascosa, Austin, Bandera, Bastrop, Bee, Bell, Bexar, Blanco, Borden, Bosque, Brewster, Brooks, Brown, Burnet, Caldwell, Calhoun, Callahan, Cameron, Colorado, Comanche, Coryell, Comal, Crane, Crockett, Culberson, Dawson, De Witt, Dimmit, Duval, Ector, Edwards, Ellis, El Paso, Erath, Falls, Fayette, Fisher, Fort Bend, Frio, Gaines, Gillespie, Glasscock, Goliad, Gonzales, Guadalupe, Hamilton, Haskell, Hays, Henderson, Hidalgo, Hill, Hood, Hudspeth, Irion, Jackson, Jeff Davis, Jim Hogg, Jim Wells, Johnson, Jones, Karnes, Kendall, Kenedy, Kerr, Kimble, Kinney, Kleberg, Knox, Lampasas, La Salle, Lavaca, Limestone, Live Oak, Martin, Matagorda, Maverick, McCulloch, McLennan, McMullen, Medina, Menard, Midland, Milam, Navarro, Nolan, Nueces, Pecos, Presidio, Reagan, Real, Refugio, Runnels, San Patricio, Scurry, Shackelford, Schleicher, Somervell, Starr, Stephens, Sutton, Tarrant, Taylor, Terrell, Throckmorton, Tom Green, Travis, Upton, Uvalde, Val Verde, Victoria, Ward, Washington, Webb, Wharton, Willacy, Williamson, Wilson, Zapata and Zavala.
For information about Africanized honey bees on the web, try http://agnews.tamu.edu/bees/