Species Panics

• In Event: Opening up Containment: Spaces, Trajectories, and Forms of Life - II

Abstract

In the 1980s, news stories appeared documenting the steady approach of Africanized “killer” bees toward the U.S. border, following the release, in Brazil, of about fifty bees imported from Africa for breeding research (Webster 1982). Accounts then and now drew on racial tropes in describing the bees’ aggression and the threat of interbreeding and hybridization, even as those accounts also cited entomologists who noted the scientific challenges of distinguishing amongst bee types with any consistency (Moore and Kosut 2013). Now, nearly four decades later, the USDA office tasked with monitoring Africanized bees has been shuttered as the bees have migrated well into Texas and other Southern states. In the process, they have lent their genetics to U.S. stocks and, possibly, their parasite resistance. While this story is one of containment failures, difference, migration, and invasive species (and often also, implicitly, anxieties about human immigration—see Subramaniam 2001 and 2014), it is also about global traffic in animals and their genes, and scientists’ efforts to use genetics to define and identify introduced and native species and manufacture more robust bees. From efforts to isolate true stocks of surviving feral honey bees in the U.S. (Seeley 2007; Seeley et al 2015) to attempts to track and select desirable bee traits through scientific breeding programs (Lozier and Zayed 2016), bee breeding efforts and work to define the boundaries of bee stocks and subspecies channel contemporary discussions of difference, heredity, and health.

Author

• Chloe Silverman, Drexel University