The Africanized Honey Bee (AHB)

An invasive species is defined as a species that is foreign to the ecosystem it is introduced too, and is likely to cause harm to the economy, environment or even to humans. Invasive species are a threat to their new ecosystems because they disrupt the normal food chain. These harmful pest species can cause wide spread habitat loss because they will most likely dominate over the native organisms who have not been adapting along with the introduced species. Some common names of the Africanized Honey Bee (AHB) are Africanized Bees, Killer Bees, and Brazilian Bees, and the scientific name/genus species is Apis Mellifera Scutella. The Africanized Honey Bee or the AHB is an animal species that is terrestrial, living on land, not aquatic. This species is invasive to South-West North America and South America.

Africanized Honey Bees are originally from Africa and were introduced into Brazil in hopes of creating a hybrid better suited for pollination in the tropical climates where normal European Honey Bee’s do not thrive. As a result the Africanized Honey bee is typically found in warmer

AHB reproduces very quickly, queen bees mate for 10-7 days with an average of 10-20 drone bees. The drone bees are actually conceived asexually and only inherit genes from the queen bee. Killer bees dominate over European Honey Bee’s and are therefore more likely to mate with the European queens and rapidly spread their Africanized offspring throughout other colonies and can actually fly up to 300 miles per year. (Featured Creatures) Naomi Milburn in her on article Life Span of Killer African Bees, claims from her research thatt they “are capable of surviving for anywhere between one and three years. The drones have markedly shorter average life spans of between five and 10 weeks. Lastly, worker bees have the shortest lives of them all, with typical lengths of around one