COLLEGE STATION -- Scurry, Comanche and Lampasas counties have been added to the state quarantine restricting the movement of commercial bee operations following the detection of Africanized honey bees there.
The addition makes 117 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.
"The increase in bee activities can be attributed to early fall swarming," Jackson said. Honey bees typically swarm heavily in the spring and to some extent again in the fall, he explained. A swarm is a group of bees that leave an existing hive when it becomes too crowded to set up home in a new location.
Bees were collected in Scurry County from an abandoned commercial beehive six miles northeast of Snyder. A wild colony was found five miles southwest of De Leon in Comanche County after the landowner was stung several times over a period of days, and a wild swarm was found in a tree 3.5 miles northeast of Lampasas in Lampasas County. Samples from all of the locations were collected and sent to Texas A&M's Honey Bee Identification Lab where they were confirmed as Africanized.
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, 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, 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, Nueces, Pecos, Presidio, Reagan, Real, Refugio, Runnels, San Patricio, Scurry, Shackelford, Schleicher, Starr, Stephens, Sutton, 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.