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Utility Workers Find Bees Nesting In Water Meters

Kathy Waters/Highlands Today

Bees have been becoming an issue for Sebring's water utility workers because they are nesting inside the water meter box.

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By Douglas  Carman | Highlands Today

Published: June 17, 2008

SEBRING — Meters need to be changed out, customers need their water cut off, the electronic registers go kaput and need rewiring ... those are pretty routine tasks for water meter readers.
But in Sebring, you can add "dealing with killer bees" to the job description, according to a utility official.

Bob Boggus, the Sebring Utilities Department's administrative coordinator, said they have started finding at least one underground water meter box swarming with killer bees almost every week.

"We're finding more and more of them ... we already had three boxes that we had exterminated," Boggus said last week. A fourth box swarmed by bees at a vacant Hawk Street home was discovered Monday while an employee tried to shut the water off.

John Alleyne, the director of the University of Florida's Highlands County Cooperative (agricultural) Extension Service office, said that only Africanized bees or a hybrid would build hives in underground meter boxes. Though he has not examined any of the boxes in person, he said the nests Boggus described are probably them.

"Everything he said is very correct," he said when told about Boggus' description and assumption that his water meter readers were finding Africanized bees. "When you start finding them in mail boxes ... definitely, you're seeing a different type of bee."

Africanized bees –– the offspring of African honey bees mating with the European honey bees more commonly encountered –– have all the aggression found in the African bees. They are more likely to nest in places like mail boxes, abandoned tires and cars, water meter boxes, hollow trees and garbage containers. The European bees are more selective in where they build their hives, and place them several feet above human reach.

Africanized bees can mate with pure European bees to make "hybrid" bees, and after several generations they're also considered full-fledged Africanized bees.

So far, Sebring is the only area in the county where the suspected killer bees are being found in water meter boxes.

Avon Park Public Works Coordinator Ted Long and Lake Placid Utilities Director Gary Freeman said their meter readers never came across bees that they suspected were Africanized.

Still, there's some dispute as to whether the bees taking over the occasional water meter box in Sebring are the bees local experts have been worried about since April, when a man was stung to death by a confirmed killer bee swarm in northwestern Okeechobee County.

Mark White, the owner of The Bug Doctor in Wauchula, said he worked 40 bee cases this year throughout Highlands, Hardee and four other counties.

In all 40 cases, he called a beekeeper to see if they were interested in catching them, since European bees have a commercial value, while the Africanized bees don't.

"Everything we're finding are just regular old honey bees that beekeepers have left behind," White said.
He explained that many beekeepers locally start moving the bee nests after the orange groves bloom to other places where they're needed, but many trucks pick them up at the wrong time. Instead of moving the nests early in the morning or at dawn when bees return to their hives, they're moving them at noon.

This, he said, causes the bees to come back and find they have no home, so they'll nest anywhere to find shelter, including a water meter box if they're available.

"I'm not saying they're not out there, but in 40-plus calls we haven't come across any this year," he said. "We've had a lot of people calling scared to death because of the rumors we've seen in the paper ... (it is) an unfair panic being generated."

Boggus, after he was told of White and Alleyne's opinions, added that some of the bees might not have been as aggressive as Africanized bees are expected to be, "but European colonies don't live underground.

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