I wrote this for a creative writing class back in the early 2000’s. I cannot for the life of me remember exactly why this was the assignment as I was in a game development program, but here it is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Africanized Honey Bee is a result of mating between African bees and European honey bees of North and South America. In 1956, a geneticist brought African queens to Brazil with the idea of developing a superior honey bee, one more suited to tropical conditions. Unfortunately, bees from 26 experimental colonies headed by African queens swarmed near Sao Paulo, Brazil. The bees interbred in the wild with the European honey bees, resulting in “Africanized” offspring. These bees are moving northward about 100 to 300 miles per year. They have spread throughout most of South America, Mexico, southern parts of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sensors:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Africanized bees react to disturbance around the hive. They can stay angry for days after being disturbed. If one bee stings, it releases an alarm pheromone called iso-pentyl acetate, which has a similar smell to bananas. This pheromone causes the other bees to become agitated and sting. <\/p>\n\n\n\n An extremely aggressive Africanized bee colony may attack any ‘threat’ within 100 ft. and pursue for up to a quarter mile. They patrol their colony and attack any animal within their patrol area. Africanized bees also attack, when the colony is threatened. Loud noises, strong odors or fragrances, shiny jewelry, and dark clothes are perceived as threats and agitate the bees which causes them to attack.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Social Laws:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The four life stages of an Africanized Bee include egg, larva, pupa and adult. It takes about twenty-one days for a regular worker to fully develop from an egg, sixteen days for a queen, and twenty-four days for a drone. Drones usually live five to ten weeks. Workers usually live fifty days. All the workers are females. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Queens live an average of one to three years. There is only one surviving queen bee in each colony. She mates over with many drones (male bees), and may lay 1500 eggs per day. <\/p>\n\n\n\n When the beehive is overpopulated, Africanized Bees swarm to a local area to start a new hive. Too much warm or cold weather may cause swarming. Only one queen bee will rule. When the two queens reach the adult stage, they battle to the death for control of the hive. The cycle of swarming continues until the hive is worn out. If you are in the path of a swarm of Africanized Bees, you have a seventy-five percent chance of a deadly attack.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Survival Rules:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The bees continue to pervade suitable habitats by swarming, the process by which colonies replicate. The original queen leaves the hive with about half the population of the nest to begin a new colony. A new queen is reared by the remaining bees in the original nest. Through swarming, the population density (# colonies\/sq.mile) in an area increases until limited by natural disasters (e.g., fire) or density-dependent environmental factors, such as food, water, and certain communicable diseases. Resource competition with other bee species or colonies may also limit the number of nests in a given area. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I wrote this for a creative writing class back in the early 2000’s. I cannot for the life of me remember exactly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-861","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonmartin.info\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/861","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonmartin.info\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonmartin.info\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonmartin.info\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonmartin.info\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=861"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonmartin.info\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/861\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":862,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonmartin.info\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/861\/revisions\/862"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonmartin.info\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=861"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonmartin.info\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=861"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonmartin.info\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=861"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}