African 'Killer' Bees May Give Some Health Solutions

Africa's bees are more aggressive than the European or American ones. It makes them "more productive and resilient" according to cnn.

The killer Africanized bees became infamous in the US for "swarming and killing" aggressively. Scientists in Nairobi are trying to harness the African bee as well as its aggression to its advantage.

"We have found in our previous studies that bees in Africa are a bit resistant, they are resilient to the bee pests," said Dr. Suresh Raina, the founder and principal research scientist at the African Reference Laboratory for Bee Health.

He said the quality is a "novel resistance mechanism," and his team is breeding bees that show such a quality creating a strong base of bees in Africa.

A Nairobi scientist collects the semen from 12 male drone bees, squeezing their thoraxes and killing them to artificially inseminate one queen bee. She works at the Queen Breeding Lab at the African Reference Laboratory for Bee Health in Nairobi, Kenya, and puts the queen in a plastic tube, attached to carbon dioxide gas that paralyzed and makes her go to sleep.

The scientist then opens her vaginal canal and drops the semen into it. The bees emerging from this queen will be less hostile to humans than this typical strain, and more productive.

"Bees are dying and countries are having shortages of pollinators, even in the United States," Raina said. "We thought, suppose if that disease occurred in Africa. What will happen to the food security system here?"

The scientists do not want to bring the bee populations to the struggling populations of the US. "You don't want to cross one variety with another one and it will cause a disaster," Raina said. Yet, some scientific studies may give some insight into the world's declining bee populations.

There are some efforts into bio pesticides from local plant extracts to fight the Varroa mite, a parasite leading to the death of bees in the US.