Killer Bees
They breed five times more often than native honeybees. A single swarm can deploy an attack force of 50,000 stingers. Their armies of suicide bombers can chase an intruder for a quarter of a mile and bring down a creature as large as a horse. And their steady flight has already taken them across two continents, expanding their territory by 200 miles a year. Killer bees are no longer a news flash. They are now entrenched in nine states across the southern U.S. and continue to advance. NGT tracks the swarm movement and the efforts to stop them, with scientists, exterminators and professional beekeepers who are using everything from sex lures to smokers. In 1956 an experiment goes wrong. A Brazilian scientist goes to Africa to bring back a batch of African honeybee queens. He hopes to breed this hardier species with local bees and increase honey production. The scientist knows he has an aggressive species on his hands, but he has no idea just how intrepid they are. When a visiting beekeeper accidentally removes a door, 26 African queens and their swarms of workers escape. Before anyone can even worry, there are more than a trillion Africanized bees in the Americas. Using recreations, science, computer graphics, and bee POVs we trace the spread of Africanized bees in the US to the modern day and look at the anatomy of a number of terrifying and often deadly attacks. We'll explore the new breakthroughs in science and discover what makes the killer bee so defensive. We'll examine how the Africanized bees infiltrate the hives of native honeybees and pass their dominant aggressive genes on to generations of new hybrid bees. Some scientists predict that by 2020 killer bees will complete their take over the American south, and all honeybees below the 34th parallel will be "Africanized". The killer bee invasion may even advance beyond the Americas. As new markets open up for the beekeeping industry, more and more bees are shipped across the globe. The killer bee may soon be conquering new territory, from Europe, to China, to Japan - even your own backyard.
