July 19, 2001

COLLEGE STATION – Lubbock County was added Thursday to the state quarantine, restricting the movement of commercial bee operations following the detection of Africanized honey bees in Lubbock.

The addition makes 134 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.

A sample of Africanized honey bees taken from abandoned hives near 62nd Street and Elgin Avenue. A beekeeper and a couple of dogs were stung.

"A sample was analyzed in a lab at Texas Tech University," Jackson said. "We accepted those results and are quarantining Lubbock County."

Jackson said inspectors presently are running the state's traplines full-time because bee activity has increased with the warm weather.

The quarantine allows beekeepers to move beehives within, but not out of, the zone in an effort to prevent assisting the spread.

Africanized honey bees look just like regular domestic honey bees, but are more defensive in protecting their hives.

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, Brazoria, Brazos, Brewster, Brooks, Brown, Burleson, Burnet, Caldwell, Calhoun, Callahan, Cameron, Colorado, Comanche, Coryell, Comal, Crane, Crockett, Culberson, Dallas, 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, King, Kinney, Kleberg, Knox, Lampasas, La Salle, Lavaca, Lee, Liberty, Limestone, Live Oak, Lubbock, Martin, Mason, Matagorda, Maverick, McCulloch, McLennan, McMullen, Medina, Menard, Midland, Milam, Navarro, Nolan, Nueces, Pecos, Presidio, Reagan, Real, Refugio, Runnels, San Patricio, Scurry, Schleicher, Shackelford, Somervell, Starr, Stephens, Sterling, 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.