Sept. 3, 2002

MONTGOMERY – Montgomery County was added Tuesday to the state quarantine, restricting the movement of commercial bee operations following the detection of Africanized honey bees.

The addition makes 144 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 wild colony of bees was taken from a hollow tree at Cedar Break Park near the intersection of Houston and Caroline streets in Montgomery. The bees were killed and a sample sent to the Texas Honey Bee Identification Lab in College Station. Jackson said the bees were found after a worker tending to the park grounds was stung. The worker has recovered.

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, Jackson noted.

State bee inspectors continue to monitor a series of bee traplines that extend across the state from Louisiana to New Mexico. The Africanized bee was first detected in the United States near Brownsville in October 1990. Since then, the bee has spread through much of the state, along a line roughly from Houston to Lubbock to El Paso. Africanized honey bees also have been found in Arizona, California, Nevada 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, Cochran, Coleman, Colorado, Comanche, Concho, Coryell, Comal, Cottle, Crane, Crockett, Crosby, Culberson, Dallas, Dawson, De Witt, Dimmit, Duval, Eastland, Ector, Edwards, Ellis, El Paso, Erath, Falls, Fayette, Fisher, Fort Bend, Frio, Gaines, Gillespie, Glasscock, Goliad, Gonzales, Gregg, Guadalupe, Hamilton, Harris, Harrison, Haskell, Hays, Henderson, Hidalgo, Hill, Hockley, Hood, Hudspeth, Irion, Jackson, Jeff Davis, Jim Hogg, Jim Wells, Johnson, Jones, Karnes, Kaufman, 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, Montgomery, Navarro, Nolan, Nueces, Pecos, Presidio, Reagan, Real, Refugio, Robertson, Runnels, San Patricio, Scurry, Schleicher, Shackelford, Somervell, Starr, Stephens, Sterling, Sutton, Tarrant, Taylor, Terrell, Throckmorton, Tom Green, Travis, Upton, Uvalde, Val Verde, Victoria, Walker, 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.