re: Africanized Bees Found in the Deep South

Can't you just drown them? I don't think they can swim.

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They even made one of the terrible TV movies where they trapped them inside the Superdome and got the temp down to where they went dormant.

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It was called The Savage Bees. See one of my posts above. One is from the 1990’s and the other is from the 1970’s that was made in New Orleans and ended at the Superdome cooling it down to 45 degrees. But at the end of the movie, there was one bee that survived.

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very disappointed at killer bees' lack of terror and the overall lack of quicksand in my adult years

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Me too. The vines are real though and they will try to kill you.

I had an encounter with a hybrid strain last year. I'm a pest control contractor so I deal with bees a lot, generally removal and relocation. Up until that point all the hives I had encountered were very docile, didn't even need a bee suit.

So this lady calls me and tells me she has bees in her garage and that she was fatally allergic to bee stings. So I call my beekeeper and have him meet me at her location. The bees were located in the wall, all I had to do was cut the drywall out, remove and relocate them...or so I thought.
I cut the drywall out and sat it aside, when I did I too a couple of stings which I expected (this is normal when you first expose them). What I didn't expect was what happened next: a swarm came at me and my beekeeper (who had his bee suit on except for his gloves). I was stung so many times I lost count. I took off running to my truck and grabbed the first can of insecticide that I could and hit all that I was able to. I then got my bee suit on and went back to the hive. By the time I got to the hive I was in severe pain and the bees were still on the attack...damn near covering my bee suit.
I told my beekeeper that these were the most aggressive bees I've ever encountered, in which he agreed. I decided to put them down, but first I wanted to catch the queen...which I did.
I took the queen to the University of Arkansas - Fort Smith and handed the trap to the entomologist at the STEM building and asked her to determine what made her so aggressive (the hive is as aggressive as the queen). A couple of days went by and she calls me to tell me it was a hybrid with the africanized gene being dominant.
I called the Arkansas State Plant Board to report what had happened, and of course I received the response "we don't have africanized bees in Arkansas". My response was "no, but we have hybrids with the same aggressive attributes". That ended up going nowhere. So I went back to the location and repaired the ladies drywall.

I don't know how many stings I took, but it was enough to cause severe pain. I have dealt with bees for years and the most stings I received from even the largest hives was about 6 and I shrugged those off like nothing. I won't even approach a beehive anymore without my bee suit on because of that.

And as a side note only semi-related - yellowjackets can go frick themselves.

Are they too lazy to take care of themselves? Do they need other species of bees to support them cradle to grave?

I had a friend from Junior High that got stung to death last year. I didn't even ask about any details but it sounded like it was hornets or some such.

I just can't believe that happened to him.

Needless to say, I'm skittish about bees, wasps, and hornets now.

As a kid, we had the Insect fear movies. It was Africanized bees, ants, tarantulas, snakes, ect.

I thought the A-Beez would have killed us all by 1982.

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I been hearing about these things since I was in grade school in the 80s

We should all be dead by now.

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I did speech about Africanized bees in a public speaking class at LSU circa 1990. Pretty fascinating stuff. I didn't tell my class the world was going to end, but I would have thought they would be more of a "thing" by now, some 35 years later.