Angry Spring Swarms Leave Residents Jittery

By Mary Jordan
Washington Post Foreign Service

SAN MIGUEL X'KALAX, Mexico -- The swarm of bees chased Daniel Couoh Puc around his little thatched-roof house, around his orange and lemon trees and finally, his wife said, into an outhouse. He slammed the door, but the bees massed around the stucco building until they found their way in through narrow window slats and killed him with more than 100 stings.

"They came like a black cloud and, oh, the buzzing sound of them," said Maria Cecilia Choc, the sad-eyed widow of Couoh, who died Feb. 26 in this small village on the Yucatan Peninsula, 20 miles south of the Gulf of Mexico. Her pregnant daughter-in-law, her 5-year-old grandson and eight others were also stung by the swarm and treated by doctors. Firefighters said that the bees' hive, found high in a nearby tree, had been disturbed by high winds and that the upset bees also killed 11 hens, 2 turkeys and 1 pig that day.

It's bee season again in Mexico, when agitated bees in one of the world's largest honey-producing nations are swarming. These spring months, jittery people around Mexico report so many attacks that some fire departments are spending as much as half of their time answering emergency bee calls.

Bees are a $125 million-a-year business in Mexico, which cultivates 2 million commercial hives, about 40 percent of them in the tropical Yucatan, said government agriculture officials. Many people have a deep respect for the medicinal and economic powers of bees and it's hard to find someone with a bad thing to say about them. People shrug off the dozen or so deaths that occur annually as the cost of living in the land of milk and honey.

This flat and humid area bursting with purple and yellow spring flowers is blessed with an abundance of honeybee colonies, and it is the center of a national industry that employs 40,000 people and produces 60,000 tons of honey a year. That output ranks Mexico behind only China, Argentina and the United States, industry officials said.

The Maya Indians, who make up the majority of the population here, for centuries have been harvesting honey, bee pollen and royal jelly -- a prized bee product used in cosmetics and medicines. Liqueurs are made from honey extracts, and glass is blown into the shape of crystal bees that are sold as souvenirs. Santiago Tec Mendoza, organizer of a group of 500 honey producers around Tizimin, said bees have wondrous curing powers, aiding everything from respiratory to arthritic problems. Tec said locals even have a saying, "If you bathe a baby in honey, he will grow up to be lucky in love."

Seventeen Mexicans were reported killed in bee attacks last year, many of them in the spring, when rising temperatures and blooming flowers stir up more bee activity, according to apiarists, people who keep bees. But among the population here, the attacks and deaths are seen as nothing more than an occupational hazard, the way miners or fishermen are accustomed to losing friends to the perils of their business.

Andres Chan Sandoval, 54, who makes his living by patiently extracting honey from hives, stood in front of the building where his neighbor Couoh died and said that despite the tragedy, "I am not afraid of bees, I have worked with them for 30 years."

Chan said that he had been stung many times over the years and that small amounts of venom from bee stings made his body healthier. "I have never once been sick," he said.

The trick is to avoid too many stings at the same time, he said. Eder Pat, the forensic doctor in nearby Tizimin who examined Couoh's body, said he counted more than 100 stings, which look similar to mosquito bites. He said few could survive the amount of toxin absorbed into Couoh's bloodstream. It sent him into shock, and his heart raced and finally stopped.

Many of the bee attacks are caused by Africanized bees, the so-called killer bees that have been slowly migrating north from Brazil for decades and arrived in Mexico in the late 1980s, said officials at Mexico's national Africanized bee control program. Since the bees crossed into Mexico, at least 600 people, including 60 in one year, have died from bee attacks, according to researchers at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

Apiarists say Africanized bees look like normal bees and are no more poisonous, but they are much more aggressive, more likely to attack in swarms and relentlessly pursue their target. Chan said that before the Africanized bees arrived in the Yucatan he wore only a sombrero when working with bees, but now he wears a full protective suit, including a mask and gloves.

In response to the threat from bees, every Mexican state has a team of paramedics, firefighters and health officials who are trained to respond to bee attacks. Fire departments across the country are flooded with bee-related calls this time of year.

In Mexico City, a metropolitan area of 20 million people, some fire stations spend at least half their time destroying beehives, often located in streetlights in busy neighborhoods. South of the capital, in Cuernavaca, a city of abundant flowers favored by bees, fire department official Luis Manuel Rendon said firefighters spend more time on bees than fires these days, with some stations responding to as many as 10 bee calls a day.

In a ramshackle fire station in Tizimin, the seat of the municipality where the farming village of San Miguel X'Kalax is located, Angel Ferraez and other firefighters were playing cards one recent day awaiting the next bee call, some of them with cups of coffee sweetened with local honey. They said about 50 or 60 people have been stung in the area in the past month, although only a few were hurt seriously enough to require medical attention.

Ferraez, one of the firefighters who responded to Couoh's house, said that while the farmer was still in the outhouse, neighbors burned corn cobs outside the door, and the smoke helped disperse the bees. Firefighters also threw soapy detergent on the bees to kill them.

"It could have been worse," Ferraez said, noting that a nearby school was in session, and that a teacher and several students were also stung. "They were running and hiding; they were afraid."

A few days after Couoh's death, eight people were attacked by bees in the village of Uci, about 90 miles to the west of here across the flat, hot plain of the Yucatan. Jose Maria Tamayo Pech said the bees first attacked his horse, Lucy, but when he tried to cut her loose from the tree she was tethered to, the bees turned on him.

He said he ran to the village's main plaza, a distance of about a football field. "This mountain of bees wouldn't stop following me," he said. "I rolled on the ground trying to get them off me."

William May, an emergency room doctor at a nearby hospital who treated Tamayo, said the villager's heart was racing from the 10 or so stings he suffered on his head, face and throat. Four adults and four children were stung by that swarm of bees and treated at the hospital, he said.

Tamayo, who lived for 39 years in Los Angeles working in car washes and at carpentry jobs, said his horse was given medicine and survived. But his dog, Nich, and 20 of his chickens died from stings.

Tamayo, his face still puffy and sore from stings more than three weeks after the attack, said he still can't quite believe that a swarm of bees interrupted his otherwise very quiet retirement. Had he still been living in Los Angeles, he said, "This kind of bee attack would only be happening in the movies."

Researcher Bart Beeson in Mexico City contributed to this report.

© 2004