Opportunistic colonists

When we finally got Abigail into the clinic in Puerto Jimenez the next day, her condition had stabilized.  It had been a long night of extracting stingers with tweezers, so we were relieved to be in the company of the familiar white-clad doctors and nurses, even if it was a backwoods operation.  Other than a particular sort of tropical morning light slanting through the windows and onto the aquamarine painted cinder-block walls, I do not recall any details of the place.

I do remember being told to wait in the lobby.  And sitting there with Kerry when my sister, still dazed from the day before, came shuffling out in her hospital johnny sobbing.  

“They won’t tell me what they’re doing to me,” she said.  

It wasn’t for lack of asking -- despite her condition, my sister was savvy enough through her own travels to keep an eye on what any foreign doctor was doing to her.   Nor was this a language issue -- Abigail is fluent in Spanish.  

I always prefer my wife’s version of this part of the story -- I’m pretty sure that I only remember it through her version.  Apparently, without another word, I went through the curtains into the back. (Were Kerry and Abigail with me?  They must have been.)  I found the doctor, in a huddle with the other nurses and doctors, and I told him three things: he would need to be more respectful of my sister; that he would need to explain every single procedure and every fluid or medication that he was putting into her; and that we would be sitting in the room with her.  

I’m 6’2”.  This doctor might have come up to my chest.  Kerry says that he looked terrified when I leaned over him, pointing.  I think I wanted him to be at least as scared as my sister.  Rarely is my Spanish that clear or fluid.  I was acting purely on sleep-deprived protective instinct.  

Whatever transpired, he caught my drift.  He explained everything to my sister while Kerry and I sat by her bed.  There were no further issues at the clinic, and Abigail -- though puffy, sore, and soaked in calamine lotion for a couple of weeks -- was OK in the end.  Afterwards Kerry’s step-father was so freaked out that he wired us some money to stay in a nice resort-type place for a week.  We hadn’t bathed in warm water or slept on comfortable beds for months.  We hadn’t paid more than $5 or $10 for a hostal in that time either.  

***

Abigail had come for a visit on her spring break, and the plan was to backpack into Corcovado National Park.  Located on the Pacific side of the Osa Peninsula of Costa Rica southwest coast, it is only accessible on foot.  To get to the launching pad, the ranger station, you can take a pick-up, which we did -- but it’s only driveable at low-tide.  We’d shared a ride with a group of three (was it four?) Israeli tourists.  We’d checked in about the same time, and headed down the beach about the same time.

A light drizzle would fade in and out, so we’d had ponchos on and off all morning.  If you have a big pack on, it’s easy to fold them back over your head when the rain lets up, or to pull them over your head if it’s coming down a little harder.  

At about an hour into our trek we decided to stop for a swim in a beautiful little freshwater stream.  Just a quick dip, air-dry, re-boot, and we were good to go.  I think about this part all of the time: the time.  The timing.  That fifteen minutes made all the difference.  How were the celestial bodies aligned just so on that day to pull a rotten tree full of Africanized bees onto the beach between the Israeli tourists and us?  

The issue of human agency or “free will” as we know it is one of the oldest human questions.  Philosophers and theologists have all weighned in.  But a number of neuroscientists are joining in.  A growing number say that free will is an illusion.  It’s not so much that things are written in the stars, they say, as guided by predictable physical laws.  As far as physical laws go, gravity is one that still impresses me every time.  

***

The hybridization of African “killer” bees and their movement into Central America was most certainly governed by physical laws as much as by random chance.  In 1956 a “prominent” Brazilian geneticist named Warwick Kerr introduced the first African honey bee to the Americas because he thought he could produce a new breed of honey bee, one which would have the favorable African quality of high honey production, but without the unfavorable “defensive” behavior they tend to exhibit.

Of course we know the end of the story: the bees did not drop their aggressive behavior, nor were they content to stay put.  By 1990 Africanized, or more technically, hybridized “killer” bees had made it as far north as the Rio Grande.  How that occurred is a wee bit murky.

Kerr did successfully create a hybrid bee, one that produced more honey.  In October of 1957 he had a total of 29 queens in various hive boxes with “queen excluders,” screens that allow the workers access to the hive but prevent the larger queens from escaping.  And some wandering beekeeper, according to Kerr, came by and removed them.  Of the 29 queens, 26 escaped with small swarms.  Kerr hoped they wouldn’t survive in the wild, or at least become more domesticated by interbreeding with the already abundant European honey bee.  

At last check, the bees have made it as far north as southern Utah.

***

I remember the downed tree.  I remember the sound of the swarm I remember thinking, man, these flies are loud.  The rest is a whirl.  

The tide was out, but coming in.  There were some pools in volcanic rock, some of them several feet deep.  After swatting wildly at my head shoulders and chest, I jumped into one of the deeper ones.  

Submerged, tranquil, floating free of the buzzing I had two distinct thoughts.  The first: shit! My boots are wet.  And the second thought followed immediately: Shit, my mom’s going to lose both her kids at once.  The practical and the existential, a one-two combination.  Not to get too philosophical about it, hiking in wet boots sucks, but death would suck a whole lot more.  After my inwardly directed thoughts, I remembered my hiking companions.  I surfaced with a gulp.  

In a nearby tidal pool, Kerry’s poncho was spread out, and she was laying face down.  Jesus, she’s dead! I thought.  I sprinted over and yanked her out of the water.  

“Put me back!  Put me back!” she yelled.   She’d used her poncho to protect her face and to breathe at the same time.  Smart.  I put her back.

Now my sister: she was wandering up the beach erratically.  She was stumbling toward the Israeli backpackers, still within shouting distance.  They were backing away and yelling something at her.  They’d tossed her a can of OFF!, which in hindsight I always think is kind of funny.  

So we got to the other side of the log, out of the reach of the bees and the nest/hive they assumed we’d wrecked.  Africanized bees will pursue up to 50 yards beyond the hive (so says Wikipedia).  I don’t know how far we got, but it didn’t take long to realize two things: our packs were right next to the tree and if we were heading back to the ranger station, we had to get back around the tree.  

Somehow, we did -- which involved wading, arm in arm, through the rough breakers with the tide coming in fast.  It was an epic struggle.  Thanks to the can of OFF! and a massive boost of adrenaline, I got the packs, which happened to contain, among other items, our passports and airline tickets -- all we had for 11 months in Central America.  

We then began the hour-long trek back to the ranger station, relieved to be alive.  But it wasn’t long before Abigail felt woozy.  So we lifted down her pack (which she’d never taken off), and raised her shirt to look at her back.  I’ll never forget that picture of hundreds on hundreds of stings.  Kerry and I looked at each other.  This was not good.  This was very bad.  My sister is not a small girl; we come from good old Iowa farm-stock, and we’ve often thought that that amount of venom would have killed a less hearty person.  

At this point, I took her pack and mine and started off at a jog for the ranger station.  I don’t know how I did it, running in sand with two packs, but a mortal fear for a sibling can introduce even more adrenaline into the system.  That day, my adrenal glands were working triple-time.  

When I got back to the station, I breathlessly explained the scenario.  The ranger asked about the type of bee, and I was able to produce one of dozens I’d killed on my head; there were plenty of dead bees stuck in my hair.

In the understatement of the year the ranger held up the bee, squinted at it, and said (in English): “That is an aggressive bee.”

We hustled out to help Abigail into the lodge and began the long process of removing stingers.  Hours of it.  This was important to keep more venom from spilling into her body from the dismembered bee-hinds.  She went in and out of consciousness.  At one point, not having any, we procured some anti-histamines from a nearby jungle lodge (thank goodness) -- which very well may have saved her life.  At one point she lost her sight.  We watched over her for the night.

There was no evacuation until morning -- remember the tide?  So it wasn’t until mid-morning the next day when we arrived at the clinic where Abigail was given fluids, antihistamines and antibiotics.  

***

Fate or luck or predictable physical law, I still marvel at the timing twenty years later.  

Philosopher/neuroscientist/anti-orthodoxy evangelist Sam Harris says that we don’t choose to choose the things we choose.  Labyrinthine logic, I try not to think too hard about it.  But I do.  And I put it in a mental box next to the idea from the buddhist philosophy class that I chose to take in college that’s followed me ever since: the present is infinite, a never ending series of events existing in a causal continuum, each present moment effecting the next.  As in: I drove to Vermont on a whim, met some guys, played music in coffee houses, met my future wife at one of our “shows,” fell in love, moved to Central America for awhile, and went for a hike.

We like to think we made those choices.  We chose to hike in the Corcovado National Park, and my sister chose Kenyon College, whose spring break in 1995 fell on a certain week in April.   She elected to visit her brother in Central America, and a tree full of killer bees fell at some point during a fifteen minute swim in a little Costa Rican stream flowing down from the highlands of the Osa Peninsula.  The timing.   

I don’t blame the bees for attacking us, for exhibiting “defensive behaviors” they’ve passed on for decades, and I don’t even blame Warnick Kerr for bringing them over from South Africa.  

The world has been getting smaller ever since humans became the dominant species.  Every cultural interaction we humans have had, just about every conflict and treaty has been about the goods, the resources and how we’re going to get them.  

Kerr himself was an import.  His parents were Scots who immigrated to The US, and then eventually to Brazil where they had a son.  Same goes for the Africanized bee, an opportunistic colonist just like us.  

The world is shrinking in other ways.  Now domesticated bees are in peril, in part due to a tracheal mite that was first found in England in the early 1900s.  By 1980, the mite was found in Mexico.  It has devastated wild populations, so much so now that farmers are depending on professional beekeepers to pollinate their fields and orchards.

Many sites say that the fear of the Africanized honey bee is overblown, and even with my intimate knowledge of their behavior, I’d tend to agree.  Back in Africa, they are still kept to produce honey.  In a place subject to frequent droughts and erratic vegetation, the AHB is still preferred by most beekeepers.

Maybe most importantly, some scientists believe the AHB could also help with the mysterious “colony collapse disorder” -- still a mystery, some think that pesticides are to blame.  Regardless, the prevalence of CCD is alarming to naturalists and farmers alike.  If they can help stabilize and rebound natural populations of bees, then I’m all for the Killer Bee.  And in that sense, I hope we haven’t seen the last of them.