Bees Could Become a Killer Tourism Attraction

What is it that keeps Ventura County so behind the times?

First-run movies make it here in week No. 2. We have a couple of Macy’s, but not a single Nordstrom. The latest in haute couture and soup de jour are smugly arrayed just over the county line.

Even the killer bee has chosen to delay his entry into The Land Time Forgot. Earlier this month, Los Angeles County officially declared itself “colonized” by the aggressive insects. Yet in Ventura County not a discouraging buzz has been heard; members of the task force that was convened six years ago to prepare for the invasion will meet again Friday. They are still waiting.

With our rotten luck, even the killer bees will avoid us. Like so many prospective tourists, they’ll make a beeline up the freeway for Santa Barbara. They’ll turn up their antennae at such local attractions as the outlet stores and the state’s once-longest wooden pier and head straight for brunch at the Biltmore.

Some killers.

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Yes, I know we shouldn’t call them killer bees. They are properly called either “Africanized honeybees” or “killerized honeybees,” depending on your mood.

Besides, saddling a single variety of bee with the label “killer” glosses over a fact well-known to me and other students of the outdoors: Every bee is a killer bee. They are no good, despite all the good they allegedly do for soybeans and marigolds. Whether they are sophisticated little Euro-bees (“You vant zum honey, honey?”) or fierce African queens, bees are bad news.

Bees are not more scared of you than you are of them, as your parents quaveringly assured you. Your parents may have done much in their lives, but they were not experts on the inner lives of bugs. Could they also tell if an ant was anxious?

Fear of bees has followed me into adulthood.

I remember happily driving along years ago when my daughter emitted a piercing shriek from her car seat: “Bee!”

I slammed on the brakes, careened over to the shoulder and flung open the doors. As my heart raced, my precocious toddler pointed to a billboard, maybe for Budweiser.

“B!” she said, beaming.

Not long ago, a bee flew through a vent in my bicycle helmet as I sped down a narrow canyon road. I threw off the helmet with my left hand. With my right, I snuffed the life out of the miserable creature, which frantically had caromed between helmet and head, burrowed into my ear and stung with the force of a dentist drilling a raw nerve.

So don’t tell me about marigolds.

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Even so, we have to admit that the killified honeybees are at our doorstep, and we may as well make the best of their inevitable decision to invade.

Mike Cooley, a veteran pest-control man from Thousand Oaks, has a telling sign on his truck. “Killer Bee Update!” it says. A few years ago, the update was “75 miles from Los Angeles!” Then it was 61. Then 10. Now Cooley’s truck says: “They’re here!”

If you’re beset by killer bees, you might do well to remember his advice:

“First, don’t jump in a swimming pool,” he said. “They’ll wait for you.”

To outsmart a swarm of insects with brains barely the size of the period following this sentence, experts say you have just one choice: Run.

“If you’re attacked, you run fast and actually in a zigzag pattern,” Cooley said. “Some of the media has twisted that to not run in a zigzag pattern, but officially they’ve found out that the bee has to compute your movements. If you run straight, they can fly faster.”

I hope the county can see the tourism possibilities here.

Maybe for once we can get a jump on the rest of California by becoming the first area to market its bad-boy bees as an attraction to those not fortunate enough to have their own.

How about a Killer Honeybee Festival, culminating in the crowning of the Killer Honey? How about a Zigzag Marathon? How about putting Ventura County on the map by welcoming our wretched little friends, weary after their long journey from the rain forest, through the desert and up the 101?

“This is Shangri-La,” exulted Cooley, speaking on behalf of the bees. “This is it!”

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Steve Chawkins is a Times staff writer. His e-mail address is [email protected]