Bees in Bonnets (and Purses) - UTH e

BUZZWORDS
Bees in Bonnets
(and Purses)
MAY R. BERENBAUM
American Entomologist • Volume 61, Number 2
“Very funny—you know perfectly well I’m a
sniffer bee, not a surveillance drone!”
surprised that on 7 May 2015, when U.S.
Customs and Border Protection agents at
the port of entry at Laredo, Texas, arrested the occupants of a Dodge Ram pickup truck for attempting to smuggle 40
live bees housed in five boxes “within
the purse and the clothing of three passengers” from Mexico into the U.S., the
story reporting the incident was awash in
predictable bee puns from various and
sundry news media. Two puns made it
into the headline of one story reporting the incident (“Sting: Undocumented
Worker Bees Busted in Border Smuggling
Operation”), and the story continued the
illegal immigration theme to the end (“No
word yet from the Obama Administration
on whether or not the bees qualify for
deferred removal” [Bannister, 2015]). I was
a little surprised, though, that the presumably staid U.S. Customs and Border Patrol
couldn’t resist the temptation to pun,
either, running the story on their Web
site with the headline “CBP Agriculture
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A
pparently, there’s an unwritten rule in the news business
that any story about bees
must contain at least one obvious,
labored (bee-labored?) pun (Berenbaum 2007). It doesn’t matter if the
actual news being reported is dire—
reporters and now bloggers seem
oblivious to the cognitive dissonance
involved in juxtaposing terrible news
with a bad pun. A case in point:
bees or beekeepers are invariably
reported to “feel the sting” of anything bad that happens, e.g., a
“huge population plunge” (Viegas
2011), “toxic pesticides” (Knoblauch
2013), “climate change” (Jacobson 2012),
and “varroa mites” (http://bit.ly/1J7ICR4,
2005), among others. It doesn’t matter
if “feeling the sting” is a technically a
biological impossibility in context—
beekeepers won’t ever feel the sting of
a varroa mite because, well, mites can’t
sting. I’m not sure when this practice
began but, as far as I can tell, the stale
“sting” joke is at least 93 years old. On 17
March 1922, The New York Times ran a
story with the exhausting yet punnish title
and ensuing subtitles, “RESCUE OF PET
BEES ROBBED OF ITS STING: Veiled and
Gloved Search Party Explores Old Wall
That Fell on Them. LOT OF CAUTION
USED: 30,000 or 40,000 Killed, but Survivors Were Waiting Chance to Get Even”
(Anonymous, The New York Times, 1922).
So I guess I shouldn’t have been
Specialists Intercept Cache of Undeclared
Queen and Worker Honey Bees at Laredo
Port of Entry” (http://1.usa.gov/1Iv7ByA)
and reporting that “Alert U.S. Customs and
Border Protection (CBP) agriculture specialists at Laredo Port of entry stung an
ill-fated and unusual smuggling attempt
as they seized a cache of undeclared live
queen and worker honey bees from a
group of travelers in a pickup truck.”
Oddly enough, only three years ago,
Brad Plumer of the Washington Post
rather presciently predicted that “honeybees” along with drones and coal would
be “hot black market” commodities “by
mid-century” (http://wapo.st/1PfhK6C).
On second thought, maybe the prediction wasn’t so amazing—there’s a long,
strange history of smuggling honey bees
on (for want of a better phrase) people’s
persons. Insect smuggling isn’t new by
any means—dealers and collectors have
been flagrantly flouting conservation laws
since the passage of the Lacey Act in
1900, and in recent years, illegal insect
trafficking has ramped up to a global
scale. On 7 April 2015, just one month
before the Dodge Ram pickup truck carrying honey bees in handbags reached
Laredo, a man carrying more than 1,000
dead insects in his luggage, including 150
endangered Ornithoptera birdwing butterflies from New Guinea, was arrested
at Los Angeles International Airport for
violating the 1973 Endangered Species
Act (http://bit.ly/1EyDRcX). At least two
books have been written about insect
70
A Greek Orthodox nun was arrested
on charges of smuggling 6,000 European bees and a hive into Kenya by
hiding them under her habit as she
passed through airport customs, a
police spokesman said Friday. He
said Sister Irene of the Greek Orthodox church in Riruta, a suburb of
Nairobi, admitted that she brought
the bees into the country illegally
by concealing them under her habit
Dec. 21 after a flight from Greece. It
was not known how she hid them.
She said she keeps bees to produce
church candles from their beeswax. A
church spokesman admitted that the
nun had smuggled the bees into the
country, but said police exaggerated
the number and that there were only
three or four queen bees and perhaps
100 others. All were confiscated and
destroyed after the scheme came to
light when she took the bees to the
Ministry of Agriculture this week to
be compared and mated with local
varieties.” (Anonymous, Los Angeles
Times, 1985).
If you’re wondering, as I did, no follow-up story appeared detailing “how
she hid them” in her habit.
In an ironic case of “turnabout is fair
play,” bees are now being used at borders
to combat smuggling of drugs. The British
company Inscentinel, a partner in Prevail,
a multinational collaboration coordinated by the Swedish defense department,
uses classical conditioning techniques to
produce the Vasor 136, a detector comprising 36 honey bees trained to identify up to six chemicals via the proboscis
extension reflex (Delaney 2011, Bogue
2015). Although bees were initially used
to detect explosives, subsequent efforts
to train bees to detect illicit drugs were
successful. According to Inscentinel, “The
smuggling of narcotics is a huge problem
worldwide and probably the main use of
sniffer dogs. At Inscentinel, we have used
honey bees to detect concealed cocaine,
heroin and 3,4-methylenedioxy-N-methylamphetamine (MDMA) in small amounts.
They can also sniff out cigarettes once they
have been trained to recognise low levels of nicotine” (Chamberlain and Rooth
2012). Perhaps the ultimate challenge for
these sniffer bees would be to sniff out
bees being smuggled in and out of the
country in purses and trousers (and the
occasional carnation in a lapel might be
a distraction).
Even though this remarkable technology hasn’t really been applied widely, it
has received a lot of attention from the
press. And yes, even from the perspective
of the detection side of the smuggling process, the story is told with the same tired
“sting operation” joke. One recent account
of sniffer bees describes them with the
headline “Buzz Kill for Bad Guys—Bees
Sniffing out Illegal Drugs and Bombs.”
According to the story, “This ‘sting operation’…is hopefully one you won’t forget
once you learn more about how bees and
wasps are being used to not only sniff out
illegal drugs but also explosives” (Beverly
2014). And in 2013, the Daily Mail breathlessly introduced sniffer bees as the “new
weapon in war on terror,” identifying the
effort to train bees to sniff out bombs at
Heathrow Airport as a “sting operation
with a difference.” I respectfully disagree,
at least as far as puns go.
References
Anonymous. 1922. Rescue of pet bees robbed
of its sting. New York Times, 17 March
1922. http://query.nytimes.com/mem/
American Entomologist • Summer 2015
Downloaded from http://ae.oxfordjournals.org/ at Don Thomson on February 23, 2016
“Insect smuggling isn’t
new by any means—
dealers and collectors
have been flagrantly
flouting conservation
laws since the passage
of the Lacey Act in
1900, and in recent
years, illegal insect
trafficking has ramped
up to a global scale.”
smuggling in the past five years (Laufer
2010; Speart 2011). But the vast majority
of insect smugglers transport dead contraband, which greatly reduces the logistical challenges of smuggling arthropods.
Even the entrepreneurial criminals that
smuggle live arthropods (to cater to the
insatiable market for exotic pets) typically tuck them away in suitcases or send
them by mail. It takes a special kind of
determined scofflaw to smuggle live bees
in your clothing.
Were I to guess who would be most likely to smuggle live bees on their person, I’d
guess it would be a beekeeper; after all,
they’re accustomed to being around bees.
Beekeepers were the original inventors
and remain the principal practitioners of
bee bearding (i.e., allowing vast numbers
of bees to wander around on the face and
body for the entertainment of onlookers,
a diversion invented by British beekeeper
Thomas Wildman sometime before 1748
[Bishop 2005]), so stashing a few bees in
articles of clothing shouldn’t be a problem. In my Internet search, I couldn’t find
any stories about beekeepers smuggling
bees around the world secreted in pockets or pocketbooks, but I did find a story
from February 1985, according to which
a Greek Orthodox nun was arrested for
“smuggling 6,000 bees in her habit”:
Bogue, R. 2015. Detecting explosives and
chemical weapons: a review of recent developments. Sensor Review 35: http://
www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/pdfplus/10.1108/SR-12-2014-0754
Chamberlain, K., and M. Rooth. 2012. Sniffer
bees. C&I Magazine Issue 9, 2012, http://
www.soci.org/chemistry-and-industry/
cni-data/2012/9/sniffer-bees. Accessed
10 May 2015.
Delaney, L. 2011. Military application of apiculture: the (other) nature of war. Master
of Military Studies thesis, Marine Corps
University, Quantico, VA, AY-10-11.
Gaidos, S. 2008. Sting operation: scientists
use bees and wasps to sniff out the illicit and the dangerous. Science News, 12
September 2008.
Jacobson, R. 2012. Beekeepers feel the sting
of climate change. PBS News Hour, 15 August 2012. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/
rundown/beekeepers-feel-the-sting-ofclimate-change/. Accessed 10 May 2015.
Kemsley, J. Sniffer bees, airborne psychotropic drugs. C & EN 90: 64.
Knoblauch, J. 2013. Feeling the sting: toxic
pesticide threatens. Earthjustice, August
2013. http://bit.ly/1Iv7p2m. Accessed 10
May 2015.
Laufer, P. 2010. The dangerous world of
butterflies: the startling subculture of
criminals, collectors and conservationists. New York, Lyons Press.
MacRae, F. 2013. New weapon in war on terror...the sniffer bees. Daily Mail, 27 April
2013, p. 39. http://connection.ebscohost.
com/c/articles/87328427/new-weaponwar-terror-sniffer-bees . Accessed 10 May
2015. ACCESSION # 87328427.
Plumer, B. 2012. What will we smuggle in
the future? Drones, coal and honeybees.
Washington Post blog, 28 December 2012.
http://wapo.st/1PfhK6C. Accessed 10 May
2015.
Speart, J. 2011. Winged obsession: the pursuit of the world’s most notorious butterfly smuggler. New York, William Morrow.
Viegas, J. 2011. Bees feeling the sting of huge
population plunge. NBC News, May 11,
2011. http://nbcnews.to/1Iv7h35). Accessed May 10, 2015..
May Berenbaum is a professor
and head of the Department
of Entomology, University of
Illinois, 320 Morrill Hall, 505
South Goodwin Avenue, Urbana, IL 61801. Currently, she is
studying the chemical aspects
of interaction between herbivorous insects
and their hosts.
DOI: 10.1093/ae/tmv032
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S h a r i n g I n s e c t S c i e n c e G l o b a l l y • w w w. e n t s o c . o r g
American Entomologist • Volume 61, Number 2
71
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archive-free/pdf?res=9E02E7DF1639EF3ABC4F52DFB5668389639EDE. Accessed
10 May 2015.
Anonymous. 1985. Nun arrested for
smuggling 6,000 bees in her habit. Los
Angeles Times, 2 February 1985. http://
articles.latimes.com/1985-02-02/news/
mn-9015_1_european-bees. Accessed 10
May 2015.
Anonymous. 2015. CBP agriculture specialists intercept cache of undeclared queen
and worker honey bees at Laredo port of
entry. U.S. Customs and Border Protection site, http://1.usa.gov/1Iv7ByA. Accessed 10 May 2015.
Bannister, C. 2015. Undocumented worker
bees busted in border smuggling operation. MRCTV, 8 May 2015. http://www.
mrctv.org/blog/sting-undocumented-worker-bees-busted-border-smuggling-operation
Berenbaum, M.R. 2007. Buzz-Woerter. American Entomol. 53: 68-69.
Beverly, W. 2014. Buzz kill for bad guys—
bees sniffing out illegal drugs and bombs.
The High Tech Society, 8 July 2104. http://
thehightechsociety.com/bee-sniffing-device/. Accessed 10 May 2015.
Bishop, H. 2005. Robbing the bees: a biography of honey—the sweet liquid gold that
seduced the world. New York, Free Press.