When Science Goes Bad: The killer bee--or how we hoped for more honey, but, yeah, that didn't pan out.

Science performs a multitude of greater good for humanity. But there are those fleeting times science goes off-the-rails in head-shaking, sigh-inducing fashion. This is where we point to those great moments mistakes in science.

Today:  That time bees were bred to make more honey, but instead became "killer" bees.


In the late 1960s and 1970s, American media reports exploded about the impending arrival of bees from South America so frightening and deadly that the United States would have chaos on their hands.

Bee-themed horror movies became all the rage. There was 1966's The Deadly Bees, 1974's more dramatic Killer Bees, and by 1976 the point was really driven home with The Savage Bees. Not to be outdone, 1978 produced a bumper crop of schlock with The Swarm (starring Michael Caine!), Terror Out of The Sky, and the rather bland-titled The Bees, but with the added tag of "They prey on human flesh!" You didn't know bees prey on flesh? You do now.

It's very helpful of the bees to avoid her eyes.

Who hasn't been attacked by bees while wearing a bikini?

This fear sweeping America all began innocently and harmlessly twenty years earlier and 6,000 miles away, rooted in an earnest attempt to improve honey-production in the Brazilian Amazon forests.

It's not that bees don't exist in South America. They do. Bees exist on every continent except Antarctica. Yet, some bees produce honey in greater quantities than others, partly based on their environment. But one such environment that they struggle in? Brazil's Amazon--and here is where the problem evolves.

In 1956, Professor and biologist Warwick E. Kerr looked to create a bee species that could withstand the strenuous Brazilian climate while producing significantly more honey. What he came up with was a blend of the western honey bee (aka: European honey bee) and the East African lowland honey bee. This appeared to be a perfect blend of talents. With the western/European honey bee, one had a fairly docile species with an abundance of honey production. Meanwhile, the East African honey bee produced less honey, but could withstand heat and humidity in South America.

The one caveat is that the East African honey bee--for lack of a better phrase--has a bit of an attitude when provoked, but kept their attitude in check as their own species.

This is not how the bee feels about your breakfast.

At his apiary outside Rio Claro, Sao Paulo, Brazil, Professor Kerr interbred the two species of bees, using queen bees from South Africa and Tanzania, and creating dozens of well-contained swarms for analysis. It was during this analysis that research noted one Tanzanian queen bee led to an interbred hive that seemed rather hostile and defensive, more so than expected or common.

Nonetheless, Kerr and his team utilized a "queen excluder" in the enclosed hives--a device used to allow access for traversing worker bees, but not the larger queen. Everything seemed to be working wonderfully. Multitudes of swarms bustled, a new species appeared feisty, and all of this was kept under strict examination.

That is until October of 1957, when one simple mistake occurred. According to Kerr, a visiting beekeeper believed the "queen excluder" was making life difficult on the worker bees. This visiting beekeeper, being a kindly gentleman, removed the "queen excluder" to alleviate worker bee difficulties--and in the process accidentally unleashed 26 swarms of the new bees into the wild.

And that was that.

Run, Michael Caine! Run for your life!

The newly developed bee species (and 26 "daughter queens" from the original Tanzanian queen) ran freely into Brazil, displaying its now overly-developed sense of hostility, and interbreeding with other western/European bee species long native to the continent. Rapidly they swept country to country throughout South America, moving into Central America in 1982 and Mexico by 1985.

And, as Hollywood feared, they finally arrived in the United States, too. By 1985, they piggybacked on oil field machinery arriving in California. Then, in 1990, the first permanent colony was discovered in Texas.

Oh, who ticked them off?

Were they as fearsome and deadly as believed? Did they kill at random? Were they worthy of low-level, low-budget horror movies with or without Michael Caine? Well, yes and no. When provoked, the "Africanized bee" (not to be confused with the "African bee") are highly defensive of their hive, they swarm in much greater numbers, and have more "guard" bees than other bee species.

This leads to occasional chaos. As the BBC News Magazine reported even in 2014, random chance encounters led to a swarm of 30,000 bees attacking a couple in Texas and killing their miniature horses, 40,000 bees killing another man in the Lone Star state, 100,000 bees attacking park employees in Florida (who survived), and an estimated swarm of 800,000 killing a man in Arizona.

In 2019, a New Mexico town closed a park after two employees survived an attack. As US News & World Report mentioned, "Officials say the town will let the bees calm down and seek a bee expert to remove them." Yes, sometimes even bees need a breather to relax.

And reports within the last year keep coming:

An attack in Pasadena, CA, where fire fighters were swarmed.

Two men died in Crossroads, TX--one while mowing his lawn--after separate attacks.

A Code Red was issued in Breckenridge, TX, after a swarm bombarded a person, while citizens were told to shelter in their homes.

Four dogs were swarmed in San Tan Valley, AZ, with one dying from an attack.

And it goes on and on and on and on...

Are the bees angrier and deadlier than other bees? Yes. Will you likely ever encounter a swarm? No. Were all the movies warranted? No. Did Michael Caine look for a quick buck and easy paycheck? Probably.

The intentions were good. Science looked to make a heartier bee that would still produce honey. Instead, it made an angry bee that sometimes needs to let off a little steam. And it all occurred because a visiting beekeeper one day wanted to help the worker bees stretch their legs a little bit.



As a side note: Michael Caine wasn't the only celebrity to appear in The Swarm, just the lead actor. Oscar winners Olivia de Havilland and Henry Fonda made cameos as well. It was a veritable who's who of money-grabbing celebrities.

A box office failure, The Swarm was actually nominated for an Academy Award for Best Costume Design, so, if anything, everyone in the cast looks dashing.

When Science Goes Bad: The Cutting Down of a Nearly 5,000 Year Old Tree

Science performs a multitude of greater good for humanity. The good outweighs the bad in almost immeasurable ways. But there are those fleeting times science goes off-the-rails in head-shaking, sigh-inducing, groan-grumbling fashion. This is where we point to those great moments mistakes in science.

Today:  The Cutting Down of a Nearly 5,000 Year Old Tree


They are relatively short and fairly ugly with little foliage, but they are as alive as they are ugly--and they are old. The oldest non-clonal organisms in the world are not the giant sequoia or the redwood. Instead, age is found in the plump, gangly limbs of the Great Basin bristlecone pine, found in the western United States, in spots humans rarely tread, so far and so distant the trees climb away from civilization and often into the mountains.

Donald Currey, then a graduate student at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill in 1964, was one of many scientists looking to seek out the oldest trees on the planet. For Currey, this was to examine the climate dynamics of the Little Ice Age, an event that happened from roughly the years 1300 to 1850. Currey's search brought him to Wheeler Peak in Nevada, where nearby bristlecone pines were known to survive well over a thousand years.

What's left of Prometheus. (Wikipedia)

Through a series of curious decisions by Currey, the National Park Service, or others, the then-oldest known living organism on the planet, a bristlecone named Prometheus, was cut down. The question that never has had a collectively-agreed upon answer is simple. Why?

Currey's aim seemed noble. He was looking to study climate change when it wasn't a talking point, even if it was climate change of centuries ago, and the coring of some trees in the Wheeler Peak area suggested this specific grove of bristlecones was at least 3,000-years old.

The problem with--or, maybe better said, the beauty of--bristlecones is that the very features of their appearance that look dead are often that. Dead. Significant portions of the tree can be killed during forest fires or other natural disasters, but if a portion survives the tree itself usually survives. Sometimes, although rarely, this strip of living tree can be as small as two inches wide, but such tiny available living trunk makes taking a coring sample difficult in order to ascertain the tree's actual age. Such was the case with Prometheus.

Stories vary as to how Prometheus ended up dead and on its side. The National Park Service claims they simply granted permission to "a researcher" (who is not named on their site, oddly) to take coring samples from some trees and to entirely cut down one other bristlecone. The Park Service alludes that Currey (who shall not be named!) simply chose Prometheus by chance. Upon felling the tree, he counted the rings and performed various analyses that said the bristlecone was 4,844 years old (and later raised to 4,862 years old), making it the then-oldest known living non-clonal organism in the world.

Other stories, like by The Smithsonian Magazine, claim that Currey simply aimed to sample Prometheus--yet, as the tree was so old, his coring tool became stuck in the bristlecone's deadened facade. A park ranger, Donald Cox, offering assistance at the time, allegedly allowed the tree to be the lone bristlecone cut down. And yet others, like at Terrain, say Currey knew fully well the tree he wanted was much older than others in the area and sought it out. The great curiosity, as the San Francisco Chronicle once noted, is if one is researching the Little Ice Age that happened somewhere around 600 years ago, why cut down any tree thousands of years old when many other younger trees would do?

The reasoning or fault for the end of Prometheus varies on which individual tells the story. Regardless, what always remains a constant is some people agreed, at some point, that the cutting down of a known thousands-of-years-old tree was acceptable. And--which might be the only concrete point of this story--Currey was only a graduate student at the time, not an expert in his field. His wealth of knowledge on ancient trees in 1964 was solid, although probably not rich. Not nearly as rich as when he died in 2004 as an esteemed scientist in his field.

In the end, Prometheus--the ancient Titan from Greek mythology--created mankind and gave humans fire, the power to destruct.

Leave it to humans to kill Prometheus--the ancient tree older than most Greek mythology--to complete the sad, poetic circle.

When Science Goes Bad: The Killing of the Male Mustached Kingfisher Bird

Science performs a multitude of greater good for humanity. The good outweighs the bad in almost immeasurable ways. But there are those fleeting times science goes off-the-rails in head-shaking, sigh-inducing, groan-grumbling fashion. This is where we point to those great moments mistakes in science.

Today:  The Killing of the Male Mustached Kingfisher Bird

"It was like finding a unicorn."

That's what Chris Filardi, director of Pacific Programs at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, told Slate writer Rachel Gross after he caught the exceedingly rare male mustached Kingfisher bird last month. A female was captured back in 1927, and again in the 1950s, but no male has ever been caught. The bird, located solely in the "sky island" of Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands, is so rare, there might only be anywhere between 250 and 1,000 left on the planet.

For nearly two decades Filardi had searched for the male variety of the mustached Kingfisher, and for nearly two decades he came up empty. So after catching the male in a mist net in September, Filardi and his team photographed the fluffy, blue and yellow bird, documented every physical characteristic and plumage, and made a variety of notes only an ornithologist would understand.

And then they killed the male mustached Kingfisher.

Pretend there's a mustached Kingfisher here.

Why? Filardi claims it was done in the name of conservation, in the name of science. "This was not a 'trophy hunt,'" he wrote in a post on the Audubon website after blowback from the public and his fellow scientists kept growing. Indeed, claims Filardi, the real advancement was really not capturing and killing the male Kingfisher, but "discovering that the world this species inhabits is still thriving in a rich and timeless way."

The problem here is that Filardi and his fellow birding enthusiasts are working off plenty of vague hopes. Take this passage from his blog post defending his decision:

"If, conservatively, 15 percent of this area represents suitable habitat, and if we assume densities we encountered are on the high end, this gives a population estimate of over 4000 individuals, a robust number for a large island bird."

What's the difference once the Kingfisher is extinct?

See? This was not a trophy hunt.

Two "if"s and an "assume" in one sentence. Sounds like hard, concrete science to me! If you're scratching your head at the logic, or lack thereof, presented by Filardi, he continues:

"Elders of the local land-owning tribe...relate stories of eating Mbarikuku, the local name for the bird; our local partners knew it as unremarkably common."

"Knew"--past tense. "Relate stories"--from the past. Again, the lack of logic keeps building upon itself. The bird used to be unremarkably common, but has decided to fool with us and play an epic game of hide-and-seek?

But Filardi continues playing both sides of the field. In a blog post he wrote, titled "Finding Ghosts" (the title alone, c'mon), he describes the morning he caught the male bird:

"When I came upon the netted bird in the cool shadowy light of the forest I gasped aloud, “Oh my god, the kingfisher.” One of the most poorly known birds in the world was there, in front of me, like a creature of myth come to life."

"Like a creature of myth come to life." But, again, this wasn't a trophy hunt.

Oh, he keeps going. Let's not stop now:

"Uluna-Sutahuri people call the bird Mbarikuku, and the older Uluna members of our team all had stories of encounters with it from their youth."

Again--the "older" locals remember encounters with the bird from their "youth." Not now, but decades and decades ago. Yet, this sort of wording, written by the Filardi, doesn't seem to register with Filardi himself, that maybe, just maybe, the bird is actually as rare as it seems. Maybe there isn't 4,000 of them, but actually 250. Maybe killing a male--which can impregnate multiple females, thus increasing the population--isn't the best idea right now.

Some fellow scientists agree. Mark Bekoff, Professor emeritus of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado, doesn't see the logic either. As he wrote in an op-ed on The Huffington Post:

"When will the killing of other animals stop? We need to give this question serious consideration because far too much research and conservation biology is far too bloody and does not need to be. [...] Killing "in the name of conservation" or "in the name of education" or "in the name of whatever" simply needs to stop. It is wrong and sets a horrific precedent for future research..."

To recap:

• There's a rare bird.
• There might be as few as 250 alive.
• The male version of this bird has never been caught.
• It's likened to a unicorn.
• It's likened to a creature of myth.
• A scientist spends twenty years of his life searching for this bird.
• He catches a male by chance.
• He kills it.
• He swears it wasn't a trophy hunt.
• He says it was done for science, so why the fuss?
• He doesn't seemingly understand the concept or meaning of "conservation."

Using Filardi's own statement, "It was like finding a unicorn"--if you stumbled upon one, a unicorn, a thing you only associate with myth--would you then kill it? Because, hell, you might never see one again!

No.

No you wouldn't.

Unless you were on a trophy hunt.

Since Filardi owns the rights to the only documented photos of the male mustached Kingfisher, I can't reasonably post a photo without getting yelled at. But the bird will probably be extinct soon, so what's the difference, right?