The killer bees we have in the southern edge of the US now are "Africanized bees" ... people ask me if they have them in Africa or assume they do, but I always point out that no, they do NOT have "Africanized" bees, they have "African" bees! That's actually an important distinction. Cross-breeding can sometimes yield some weird and unexpected results, and in this case, well, if you'll excuse me, I'll tell a story (:
Honeybees (Apis mellifera) are not native to the Americas. They were brought here by the European colonists from Europe. So in Brazil around the 50s they were like "why are we trying to use temperate bees from Europe in the tropics!? let's get some tropical bees!" ... so they brought some bees from Southern Africa, which turned out to be Apis mellifera scutellata, the Savannah bee, and bred them with Apis mellifera mellifera from Europe and.... in a classic mad scientist tale the bees were not only incredibly bad tempered, they escaped! And the rest is history!
But to answer your actual question, they have a wide variety of honeybees from the African subgroup. I think they have some Apis mellifera adonsonii which is predominant in Western Africa and possibly some scutellata which is more dominant to the south. They are all more aggressive than European honeybees but not as bad as the "killer bees." Also much more "crawly" (by the time I finish going through a beehive most of the bees will have crawled out of the box and be covering the outside), and much more prone to "abscond" and leave the area when there's not enough food.
Sorry for the really long answer. What can I say, I like to talk about bees ;D
Ooh, that's really interesting! I didn't know that about the cross-breeding (though, to be fair, I did know that killer bees were an American product - I just always assumed it was a natural development because people are jerks and the bees went 'Screw you, you silly white men').
Honeybees (Apis mellifera) are not native to the Americas. They were brought here by the European colonists from Europe. So in Brazil around the 50s they were like "why are we trying to use temperate bees from Europe in the tropics!? let's get some tropical bees!" ... so they brought some bees from Southern Africa, which turned out to be Apis mellifera scutellata, the Savannah bee, and bred them with Apis mellifera mellifera from Europe and.... in a classic mad scientist tale the bees were not only incredibly bad tempered, they escaped! And the rest is history!
But to answer your actual question, they have a wide variety of honeybees from the African subgroup. I think they have some Apis mellifera adonsonii which is predominant in Western Africa and possibly some scutellata which is more dominant to the south. They are all more aggressive than European honeybees but not as bad as the "killer bees." Also much more "crawly" (by the time I finish going through a beehive most of the bees will have crawled out of the box and be covering the outside), and much more prone to "abscond" and leave the area when there's not enough food.
Sorry for the really long answer. What can I say, I like to talk about bees ;D
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