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Other Nations

by

Soraya King


The animal shall not be measured by man…They are not brethren; they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth. --Henry Beston

THE FIRST sign of alien intrusion beams into a docile honeybee colony a humming, predatory energy, like water suddenly brought to a boil. Powered on, a saw whines dully as it slices concrete, puffing white smoke into the open air. The monstrous invader then lifts the broken top of the hollow column, and the soft warning-glow accelerates into mania. This is apocalypse. A blizzard of dark honeybees, themselves bits of adrenaline, saturates the atmosphere of this suburban household’s front porch. The bees bump against mesh veils barring off human breath. Ready to attack, they search for the warm patches where clothing stretches tight over human joints.   
           Inside the column, thousands of droning bodies shift over honeycomb. With the ceiling now removed, their black eyes glitter under a patch of violet sky. Some gorge honey while others cluster tightly around the queen, grasping each other by the limbs in a great net. The crowd crawls downward, away from the sparse honeycomb – built in the mere two weeks they’ve lived here – away from the light and the probing white suits. A monstrous force jolts the exquisite white comb from the inside-wall, and it vanishes through the open ceiling. Yet the ball of bees continues to move downward and away, while thousands of others outside the column zip in all directions, blotting the atmosphere with the scent of banana: the alarm-pheromone meant for communicating danger. Attack. But most don’t. Most cluster about the queen and zip around in the air like a great sandstorm. The colony is already doomed.
           A stream of rancid liquid plummets through the ceiling and splatters the column’s base, forcing the ball of bees to change course, upward. They spill desperately out of the cracks near the top, where honeybees carrying bright sacks of pollen return to chaos after leaving an intact hive shortly before. A gloved human hand moves a roaring vacuum against the clinging clump of bees, and they now feel the terrible drag of great suction as it wrenches them into an abyss. Others still fly frantically in all directions, some of their delicate coats covered in white plaster dust.
One honeybee turns in circles by the entrance to the column, listless and isolated. As a gloved hand pushes steel wool into the crack, her delicate back legs become entangled, pulling her into the mess, where she is quickly crushed. But she is not yet dead. She uncoils slowly, punctuated in sharp clicks like a metronome. She dangles from the fine metal wires and then falls to the ground, rolling, pathetic and crumpled. Only inches from her a livelier injured bee falls, thrashing wildly on the ground, never quite able to make it off her back.

                                                                                 ellipsis

            The intruder – an apiarist in his late 30s, bald, with blue eyes gleaming through a soft-peach complexion – grasps the keg-sized bee-vacuum by the handle, lifting the captured insects with one hand while balancing a plethora of tools in the other. Stomping stiffly under the weight down the household’s front path – away from the destroyed hive, the whirlwind of displaced bees and agonized insects lying twisted on cement – Bill meets by the curb his “bee chariot,” an improvised affair. A boxy Honda Element with rusty, sticky equipment stacked to the ceiling, it pulls a humble wooden wagon that shudders and creaks when trailed along the daily miles of highway. This was a “normal rescue” for Bill, the only bee “technician” in a company of three that relocates unwanted hives to volunteered land, maintains them, and regularly steals their honey. Save for winter months, Bill does this every day. Some nights, when he gets to bed, he still sees thousands of electric bees whirring before his closed eyes.
           His young assistant hurries after him, clumsy in a much-too-large bee suit, a cross between heavy-duty gardening attire and a white fencing outfit. The middle-aged resident of the home strides last in this parade, peppering the scene with questions: How do the bees reproduce? Can he keep a piece of comb? Would the two beekeepers visit his daughter’s kindergarten class?
He had seen the bees two weeks before, a black cloud of energy whipping through the air, then gathering at the bottom of the column on his front porch, shrinking until it vanished. He didn’t want the bees exterminated, what with that “bee collapse disorder and all,” and that’s why he’d called this company.
            The bald beekeeper stuffs the murmuring, plastic container into the backseat of his car. Several dark-brown honeybees – the ones who flew rather than clung with the other thousands in the vacuumed clumps – crowd the creases under the lid or stand on top of it, their abdomens raised high in the air as if attempting hand-stands. They’ve stopped trying to attack the intruders. Furiously fanning their wings in this stationary position, they spray the Nasanov pheromone around the container, a scent of rose and lemon. This fanning signals to the others that the queen is within: this is home, though thousands of bees remain isolated from the maternal uniting force by thick plastic. They will all die within a few days. Car doors slam, and the two beekeepers head out for coffee.
            They enter the café sweaty, stinking of decomposed organic matter, and aside from the mesh “fencing” veil, they appear in full uniform: white clown suits and dusty brown boots. From the amused and excited expressions on several turned heads, the café customers clearly recognize the outfit. Beekeepers definitely hold a place in the popular imagination in the U.S., and not only for their costumes. They stand almost within the same spotlight as the honeybees themselves: the unique insects that produce the famous golden sweetness, their own fiery societies, and over one-third of America’s diet.
           "You bee keepers?"
The manager has been beaming at them for some time now. The whole room sips and listens. Why, yes! Bill instantly commences a well-rehearsed rundown of his small company’s efforts to relocate feral bee colonies rather than exterminate them, while reaching into his pocket for business cards. Most beekeepers love to talk about it. But the manager hardly listens, and continues smiling and nodding, waiting for a chance to speak. “We have bees here,” he cuts in, gesturing to the ether, outside.
           Two coffees, please, and a packet of honey.

                                                                                 ellipsis

           The honey bees’ contemporary fame in America arose from the Texas grasslands twenty years ago, when researchers discovered a long-anticipated phenomenon of mythical proportions: “killer bees,” the zombies of the insect world. To fearful local residents, they spread their raging infections as mindlessly as cancer. These malicious immigrants from Africa, these terrorists from Brazil and from Mexico disrupted a nation’s way of life, after radiating like terror up the spine of the Western hemisphere. In American film, they cold-bloodedly sought out an equestrian club and attacked a handsome nuclear family out for a picnic. The country was “at war” with this Deadly Invasion, which had festered already for “some time, breeding, increasing” (as the young Michael Caine once claimed in The Swarm). In the news, they threatened to spread like wildfire to every state, city, home, and defenseless elementary school in America.
           The myth began in 1956, when the Brazilian government commissioned entomologist Warwick Kerr to introduce African bees to South America in order to increase honey production. The “race” of honeybees originating from Central and South Africa became better-suited to desert climates than were the “Europeans”: they forage for nectar earlier and end later, work during cold weather and light rain, carry more pollen, produce more honey, and possess stronger immune systems. Kerr hoped to create a “mixed race” that was both productive (like the Africans, which the Brazilians call the “brave bee”) and docile (like the Europeans, commonly raised in Western countries): he imported some African queens, and cross-bred them with his own European honeybees. How these hybrid bees escaped the contained apiaries in 1957 itself approaches legend, the reasons differing between accounts, though they all lay blame on an anonymous “visiting beekeeper.” But whenKerr became a fierce critic of the Brazilian military regime in the 1960's, the government retaliated against his protests by portraying Kerr as the man responsible for creating a plague. A 1965 military press release blamed all stinging incidents—whether by bee or wasp—on Kerr's experimentation. Time magazine in 1965 translated “abelhas assassinas” from the Brazilian propaganda into the term “killer bees,” and thus the myth was born. As the so-called “Africanized” hybrids, the killers, spread through the years across the Western Hemisphere, panic and sensationalism shadowed their tracks.
           They entered the United States right in the middle of the first Gulf War, in October 1990, when the country was caught up in the end of the Cold War. President H.W. Bush’s approval ratings would soon skyrocket to roughly ninety percent after the first U.S. offensive against the Iraqis. In this American setting, the zombies of honeybees swarmed over the Mexico border into Texas. The “killer bees” re-appeared on broadcast news stations as “highly dangerous and destructive” insects that may sting in great numbers even when “unprovoked.” Many newspaper articles simply referred to any bee attack as perpetrated by “Africans” or “Killers” without the a DNA evaluation to confirm them as, correctly termed, “Africanized.” And as they quickly became the pop insect of the twentieth century, the bee extermination business boomed.
           But then a new phenomenon thundered into mainstream media a few years past the new millennium. The honeybees were vanishing: not dead or dying in the hives, but simply gone, decomposing far away from their abandoned homes. In these barren hives the queen remained, usually with a small group of young adults and plenty of food stores untouched by pests or “robber bees” from other colonies. This happening, deemed Colony Collapse Disorder, affected enough commercial colonies to make major headlines. Would we, who need the bees in order to eat, ever understand this act of nature? Did industrial pesticides, overpopulation, or radiation from our technologies cause it? Was this “collapse” a harbinger of the collapse of human civilization? Was Mother Earth punishing us?
            Mysterious bee losses have occurred several times in the past, with similar reactions. Plagues turned hundreds of thousands of infected larvae into solid mummies, and adults were found gone, dead or sick and crawling from the entrances. Much more recently, in September of 2011, 12 million bees throughout 30 different sites around Brevard County, Florida dropped dead around the same time, allegedly due to airborne pesticides. As with other bee disappearances of this kind (May Disease in the late 1800s, Disappearing Syndrome in 1975, and others) studies blamed human disruption of the environment in some form. In CCD’s case, entomologists at Penn State suggest that these “collapsed colonies” hold bees infected with just about every known bee virus, the level of infection so great that the real “collapse” appears to occur in their immune systems.
The world seemed to weep for the honeybees after a decade of betrayal. They suddenly became our heroic workers, our superstars, our own reflection and the reflection of our environment. The mysterious “collapse” of the honeybees coincided almost exactly with mainstream news of impending global warming, of mania over “inconvenient truths,” of environmental breakdown. These anxieties finally clearly began to shape our markets. In 2007, Haagen Dazs ice cream began their “buy a carton, save a bee” campaign. Dutch electronics giant Phillips created a glass hive that an urban dweller can keep in her apartment without access to a backyard or a roof. And shoppers started buying more honey.

                                                                                 ellipsis

           In a cottage in horse-country one breezy morning, gathered in a bright dining room surrounded by books and jars of honey, three is a company called Backyard Bees. A “hands-on technician” – the bald apiarist who captured the feral colony from the cement column – a pretty “administrator” and a “product designer,” a petite, middle-aged woman named Janet with mousy-brown hair and a somber, dramatic air. The two ladies co-founded this small business, which maintains around sixty captured and relocated colonies dispersed all over the county. They in turn rob the honey year-round, bottle it at $7, $10 and $15 a jar, and often combine it with wax and herbs to make lotions and lip-balms that smell like heaven.
           Six months ago, the largest U.S. chain grocer and marketer of the “organic food” trend called the home’s landline. As commercial pesticide misuse and energy waste floated up into the public agenda, Whole Foods Market began a major campaign to pull locally produced products into each county’s gigantic stores. A representative responsible for searching the region found the honey company’s website, and shortly thereafter three suits visited the cottage, and snacked on fruit, cheese and honey with the three – pleasantly surprised – small business owners. They even shuffled through the backyard gravel in their shined shoes, peering enthusiastically over at the three white stacks of boxes humming with golden honeybees. When the top of one box was lifted up, the suits grinned. The bees continued, indifferently.
           A plump vat of dark-amber honey sits in a backroom of the cottage, the end result of a short straining process, during which they simply remove bits of bees and wax from this stolen treasure. Janet dips a teaspoon into the vat, taking a tiny pool of honey that smells of eucalyptus. The teaspoon of dark amber liquid, the life’s work of twelve honeybees, the distilled nectar of almost 32-thousand blossoms in a collective flying-distance of 860 miles, dissolves on the tongue in an instant.
           In the cottage’s backyard, four beehives sit inconspicuously within a garden blotted with crimson, amethyst and cream-colored blossoms, a solid shape against a mosaic of color. It is Fall; blossoms die and a faint chill begins to cling to the breeze.

                                                                                 ellipsis

           As winter hovers only a brief time beyond the declining autumn bloom, nectar is scarce, and three, five, six workers are dragging an adult male to the gates. Male drones – bloated giants appearing as incompetent royalty in delicate, mink collars – cannot gather food, cannot clean the cells or secrete wax or produce honey or care for the young, and they cannot sting. They gorge on pilfered honey under the regulation of the workers, and fly clumsily under their own massive weight. They do not “work”: they only wait for their impending swift, explosive death or submit to a slow one. This one now clings to the edge of the hive two feet above the ground as smaller “workers” latch onto his giant abdomen and pull him downward. Others step on his legs and tatter his wings. He had been one of the clumsier of the drones during his short lifetime, and his freeloading is no longer welcome. 
           Only a month or so before, on a warm afternoon, he had congregated with other anxious drones not far from their own hives, waiting, watching the skies with his remarkably large eyes. His antennae, with sensitivity five times stronger than that of a worker, picked up the faintest fragrances in the breeze. A new queen had emerged from her cell some short distance away.
She could have been born a worker, like the thousands that sustain the hive, had they fed her the appropriate diet. All bees begin as eggs laid by their mother the queen; they all float within the hexagonal cells of the honeycomb, soaking in nutritious royal jelly and receiving visits from worker bees collectively more than one thousand times per day. In the darkest, lowest part of the hive where the brood grows and the queen resides, the young “nurse” bees touch her with their antennae, constantly assess her health and spread her scent outward, through the masses. But if her attendants sense that they need a new queen –either because the old one is dead, unwell, or not laying enough eggs, or because the colony’s population exceeds the space available – they grow replacements. The workers build wax cells, similar to peanut shells in size and texture, around seven or eight three-day-old eggs, and continue this diet of royal jelly for only this select few.
The designation of the royal eggs by the workers may very well be arbitrary, but when the new monarchs tear open their cells after sixteen days, emerging five days earlier than the developing workers and destined to live for several years rather than six weeks, they are long-bodied virgins complete with reproductive organs and the pheromone-producing glands necessary for uniting thousands.
           There are codes among the bees: these same codes led the drone to wait in an open space, caused flowers to develop into an aesthetically pleasing pattern for the pollinators, and created the astounding efficiency with which one of the most efficient societies on earth collectively forms series upon series of tightly-fitted wax hexagons, flooding the colony with the fruits of their labor. 
And when this queen propelled herself out of her cell, her moist body shuddering as though from a surging fever and murder in her program, she already knew the code: she clambered swiftly to the other peanut cells, stinging through the wax and killing her erstwhile competitors, who may have been only minutes behind her in the race. Her ailing mother is often next on the hit-list; otherwise the two queens may exist together in one hive for a short time before the older one departs, accompanied by about half the workers, to begin again elsewhere.
           The drones waited for her, as they often do, almost every sunny afternoon when the weather is right for flight. About a week after the virgin queen’s birth, our doomed drone sensed the arrival; they all did. She was on her mating flight, emitting an alluring come-hither pheromone while speeding through the air, anywhere between thirty to three hundred feet above the ground. The codes were glowing as our drone took flight along with the others, following behind the queen like the tail of a comet.
           But he blundered; he was too slow, too clumsy, perhaps flew off course at a turn. It was another drone who first caught up and clung to the queen in mid-flight, inspected her with his legs and antennae, and, deeming her a worthy mate, commenced copulation.
The act immediately stunned and seemed to paralyze him. The queen continued flying. After a moment, his body slowly fell backward, breaking away from his reproductive organs like a worker bee from her stinger. He dropped to the ground and died. Several more drones managed to fling themselves at her, and at the same fate. After this summer mating flight (as she will never need another to produce eggs for the remainder of her life), she flies back to her colony, leaving the slower drones far behind.
           Our drone was slower, and so he returned to his colony near dusk to gorge on honey, rest, and eventually return to the congregating area for another day’s watch.  But within the next month, and with a fertile monarch in residence, the female worker bees often begin persecuting the drones by withholding food and sometimes gnawing off their wings and legs in an effort to evict these unproductive, defenseless males. This time of the year requires meticulous conservation. Most drones go willingly, but our drone is not one of these.
           The reluctant male is pushed, pulled, dragged and beaten through the heavy traffic within his hive, other worker bees simply bumping against the struggling cluster accidentally or momentarily joining the effort before moving along. Eventually he and the few offending workers come to the edge of the hive. The honeybees also carry their own dead here, as well as their unwanted male larvae, other stubborn drones and alien invaders, to drop them over the side in a heap of carnage.
           They push the drone past the entrance, stomp on his feet, pull him down. He now clings to the side of a man-made, wooden plank protruding from the edge of his hive, in a small garden in a woman’s backyard, the wildflowers which his colony first foraged only a foot behind him. The garden smells of oranges and jasmine. A pinto horse in a stall but yards away stares past him, swishing its tail and chomping hay. A whirlwind of bees encircles him with excited energy, like electric hailstone, zipping in all directions as he dangles above the dreary mess on the ground. Worker bees crawl out to where he clings, quickly buzz their thin wings, then spiral upward, dashing out beyond the garden, to forage some crop that they will locate by its relationship to the sun. Others come in, through the gates, carrying balls of neon-orange pollen on their heels. The garden smells of honey. He loses his grip and falls, officially evicted. He will die outside the hive in a few days’ time, away from its sweet chambers.
           His mother the queen, bountifully fertile and honorably laying her eggs, does not seem to care.

                                                                                 ellipsis

            Experienced beekeepers know that each colony has its own distinct personality: a face, each bee a cell that dies if isolated from the hive. But this face usually bears a striking resemblance to a human one.
           On the verge of World War II, decades before Karl von Frisch won the Nobel Prize for his obsessive research on bee behavior, the leading light of the German National Socialist Lecturer’s League tried to get him fired.
           “He lacks entirely the ability to…find connections to the natural establishment of a volkish polity, something that seems so self-evident and would be so easy given his area of expertise, bees,”
Ernst Bergdolt, the editor of the Journal for the Entire Natural Sciences and a Nazi since the age of twenty, wrote to the Ministry of Education. To von Frisch, his hives offered orderly relief from the chaotic Nazi regime. But to Bergdolt, the ideology of the hive could potentially embody the utopian promise of Nazism itself, and “von Frisch’s hives” deserved no place in the Institute of Zoology.
As a dominantly female society, and with the queen a figure of doubtful self-sovereignty, almost a solitary slave to the workers, honeybees seem drastically at odds with National Socialist ideals. But when wrenched into a mirror’s place, the allegorical possibilities seem endless: labor for the greater-good, formal orderliness, subjugation of the individual self for collective function and the efficient disposal of individuals of inferior value. The bees presented a productive, bounded world easily viewed with the gleaming ideals of totalitarianism. In this light, animal capacity dissolved, leaving in its place instinctive action for community preservation, and scientists willing to brace these ideologies with their professional voices.
           Von Frisch instead qualified his own editorializing remarks with the grandeur of bees’ senses. To him, these were the “the most perfect insects with sheer incredible instincts”: conscious, adaptable, capable of making decisions.  The researcher tried to reorient understanding of animal cognition away from the traditional stimulus-response model, toward acceptance of their sensory intricacies. The workers’ abilities to choose their own queens, become fertile in emergencies, and transform from nectar-foragers into house-hunters during the swarm, all stand as examples of this complexity. “Knowing the date of individual discoveries [about animals] does not matter a great deal,” von Frisch once wrote, “it is more important to consider in their entirety the accomplishments of these small insects, the bees…to restore…that reverence for the creative forces of nature which has unfortunately been lost by so many of today’s people.”
           But when a nectar-scout returns to the hive, centers herself among the others and commences her highly sophisticated sign language, we can only eavesdrop. This is only what we hear: she turns round repeatedly in an infinity-sign pattern on top of the honeycomb, pausing in the middle to buzz for a duration of time that denotes “distance,” or more specifically, expended energy. She factors in winds, slopes and obstacles to the “distance” of the crop, and the surrounding workers who hear her, touch her, smell her and taste the new nectar, correspond the direction of her mid-infinity vibration to the direction of the sun. They only require one patch of sky to keep pace with the sun’s movement in relation to the hive, for they can see polarized light. With a sample smell and the general direction of promised nectar in their memories, hundreds of foragers depart the hive to sample the environment for the humans. They return with nectar, pass it to “house” bees who turn it into honey, their productive society swelling with meaning for humans. Thousands of foragers hover miles beyond, searching, collecting, returning, and departing again, from early morning to the late afternoon. And as we watch, the mechanically scientific, stimulus-response explanation dwindles, and we are reduced to speaking in code.

                                                                                   ellipsis

           In a wide meeting-hall on an urban farm, ugly florescent lights paint strain on all sixty attendees’ faces. Pale T-shirts, blue jeans, dusty boots, fanny packs and clipboards saturate the scene, while several fellows swigging colas in the back of the room near the snack table don cowboy-hats and yellow shirts displaying the classic “Ghostbusters” logo, with a bee instead of a ghost crossed out. They work for a large bee extermination company, which also runs this bee club meeting. The others, the local beekeepers in the room have ventured here tonight to hear Jerry Hayes, Florida’s top bee expert, speak about Colony Collapse Disorder.
           There is a rival in attendance. Bill – the bald apiarist – sits inconspicuously in the back of the room, shrinking in toward his clipboard, hastily giving away his raffle ticket so as not to risk winning one of the club’s prizes at the end of the meeting and becoming the center of attention. The two ladies of Backyard Bees were long ago a part of this club, but disputes over financial and political control caused them to shun themselves, and to be shunned. They also differ in theory. The exterminators that run the club consider relocation too risky for a liable large-scale business: after all, all honeybees in Southern California are now technically Africanized! Bill and the Backyard Beekeepers often remove hives like that in the residential cement column, however, and believe that with patience, one can discern the behavioral habits of a hive before tossing them into a trash bag along with dry ice. The extermination company admires the academic American Bee Journal. The smaller company prefers the outspoken Bee Culture.
           There also shuffles – between the snack table and her front seat several times – a sun-baked lady who indeed seems to be everybody’s rival. Her brownish-gray hair frizzes out like a pyramid over an ancient face, she wears a flowered dress and her cracked toenails show through her open leather sandals. She likes free stuff. Free snacks, free books and free paper towels, which the club-runners once caught her stealing. She remains a “fixture” of the club, even after some members once tried to vote her out. She calls the club’s secretary often, always asking for a list of the pesticides that are killing the bees. She in fact mumbles about pesticides this entire evening as she shuffles among the crowd:
           “It’s those pesticides. It is.
           Hayes, thin and pepper-haired, lectures the audience in a nasally voice on a number of plagues allegedly contributing the disappearing bees: among them, parasitic varroa mites (proportionally equivalent to a bee as a fist to a human body), factors of production bee keeping, industry-caused bee stress, inhospitable human neighbors with “entomophobia,” and of course pesticide misuse. The pyramid lady stops him:
           “Yeah, if you read the obituaries, people are dyin o’ cancer. And you gotta think, the bees are            our canary in the tunnel.”
            She turns around forcefully, glaring at her new audience. Hayes generously brings this point back into context: yes, honey bees are actually our environmental samplers, he explains as he displays a list of over one hundred pesticides found in all 700 samples of beeswax in a recent nationwide survey. Another beekeeper asks about a homemade recipe for curing varroa mites, and infamous parasite of bee colonies.
         “No! You see – no. Beekeepers are the smartest, dumbest people on earth. Don’t just mix            something together in your kitchen because you want to save a nickel! Please.”

           The pyramid lady considers thoughtfully and then boldly raises her hand.
            “Jerry. It sounds to me like all this Colonial Collapse affects humans, ultimately.
            “We don’t have time to talk about that now.”k letter




Sources
Robbing the Bees  by Holley Bishop
Bees: Their Vision, Chemical Senses and Language by Karl von Frisch
The Backyard Beekeeper by Kim Flottum
The Hive and the Honeybee by Joe M. Graham
The ABC and XYZ of Bee Culture by Roger Morse
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, Book 11, Ch. 20
Insectopedia by Hugh Raffles
-“Playing Hive and Seek with the Backyard Beekeepers” by Gustavo Arellano
-“Free Bees: Lessons from the Hive” by Fred Hapgood, Harper’s
-“The Hum of Bees” by Susan Brind Morrow, Harper’s
-“A Closer Look – Drone Congregation Areas” by Clarence Collison, Bee Culture
CCD:
-‘Wake up! The Bees are on their Knees: CCD is threatening our hives’ by Ben Macyintyre, The Sunday Times, Aug 10, 2007.
-“Stung” by Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker
-“Rumsfeld and the Bees” – Slavoj Zizek, June 28, 2008, www.guardian.co.uk
-“Colony Collapse Disorder: Have We Seen This Before?” – Robyn M. Underwood and Dennis van Engelsdorp
-“What’s Buzzing with Africanized Honey Bees?” – www.nationalatlas.gov
-“Africanized Honey Bee: Continuing Education Professional Development Course,” Technical Learning College, PDF
-“Killer Bees in the United States (BEE Case)” – American University, Washington DC
-“Attack of the Killer Bees!” By Gregory McNamee – Tucson Weekly, Dec. 19 1996
-“Alien Nation” –  Based on maps from US Department of Agriculture, Harper’s, September 2000
-“Buzz off!: The Killer Bee Movie as Modern Belief Narrative” – Mikel J. Koven, University of Wales, Aberystwyth.
-“The Language of Bees: An Interview with Hugh Raffles” Cabinet, Issue 25
-“New insights into honey bee (Apis mellifera) pheromone communication. Is the queen mandibular pheromone alone in colony regulation?” by Alban Maisonnasse, Cédric Alaux,Dominique Beslay, Didier Crauser, Christian Gines, Erika Plettner, and Yves Le Conte,   PubMed Central.
-“Cognitive aging is linked to social role in honey bees (Apis mellifera)” by Andreas Behrends, Ricarda Scheiner, Nicholas Baker, and Gro V. Amdam,  PubMed Central.
Video: The Case of Vanishing Bees, an Interview with Expert on Bee Blight (Jerry Hayes), CBS website, Feb 13, 2007