COLLEGE STATION – Concho, Cottle and Robertson counties were added Thursday to the state quarantine, restricting the movement of commercial bee operations following the detection of Africanized honey bees there.
No bees were found in Coleman County, but it was added because the find in Concho County meant Coleman was surrounded by quarantined counties, according to Paul Jackson, chief inspector for the Texas Apiary Inspection Service, a unit of the Texas Agricultural Experiment Station.
The addition makes 127 counties in Texas now quarantined for Africanized honey bees, according to Jackson.
In Concho County, a sample of bees were taken from under a house near Vick. In Cottle County, bees were found in a tree near Paducah. The bees in Robertson County were found in a vacant building owned by Calvert Independent School District at 914 E. Wharton.
The only stinging associated with any of these finds was a person stung once at the building in Calvert. That person was not seriously injured and is fully recovered. All of the bees involved in these three cases were destroyed.
"Samples were collected and taken to Texas A&M's Honey Bee Identification Lab where they were confirmed as Africanized," Jackson said.
The quarantine allows beekeepers to move bee hives 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, Brewster, Brooks, Brown, Burnet, Caldwell, Calhoun, Callahan, Cameron, Coleman, Colorado, Comanche, Concho, Coryell, Comal, Cottle, 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, Liberty, Limestone, Live Oak, Martin, Matagorda, Maverick, McCulloch, McLennan, McMullen, Medina, Menard, Midland, Milam, Navarro, Nolan, Nueces, Pecos, Presidio, Reagan, Real, Refugio, Robertson, Runnels, San Patricio, Scurry, Schleicher, Shackelford, 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 Internet, try http://agnews.tamu.edu/bees.