By Steven Beardsley
The Naples Daily News (Florida)
BONITA SPRINGS, Fla. — When the honeybees hit the air, the firefighters hit their new suits.
Bonita Springs firefighters responded Tuesday to a bee-related call that forced them to use their white canvas beekeeping suits for the first time since the district purchased them more than a year ago.
The call came after honeybees attacked a woman on Atlantic Avenue, as she was mowing grass near a vacant trailer. The bees had built their combs in the trailer’s crawl space.
Robert Reading, a neighbor to both the vacant trailer and the home of the victim, said he was sitting in his lanai when he heard the commotion.
“I heard the screaming and I thought, What the hell is this?” he recalled. “I walk out and she’s swatting all over the place.”
Reading said that when firefighters showed up minutes later, they put on the white suits.
“They changed into them and I thought, Ooh, what’s this?” he said.
Firefighters used a hose to blow foam at the bees, an effort to take them out of the air. Local beekeeper B. Keith Councell then arrived to kill the colony.
Nicole Giuliano, a Bonita Springs fire spokeswoman, said the victim - whose name is not being released - received a good number of stings but refused to be taken to the hospital.
Councell sent several of the bees to a state lab for genetic testing, which should determine if the colony was comprised of Africanized bees.
Africanized honeybees are overly aggressive and attack in large, exaggerated numbers when disturbed. Common honeybees, which hail from long-domesticated European strains, respond less aggressively when provoked, although they can still gang up on an attacker.
The district should receive the test results in two weeks, Giuliano said.
Bonita Springs administrators originally bought their beekeeping suits in May 2007, after watching a training video that warned about Africanized bees and unprotected firefighters.
They bought 32 suits for $65 apiece, a total of $2,080.
“I believe that this is the first” use of the suits, Giuliano said.
She said the suits ensure firefighters can help stinging victims without getting stung themselves.
“If we can’t get to him or her, then we’re not doing any good,” she explained.
In Lee County, the number of identified Africanized bee colonies has increased, according to limited statistics from the Florida Department of Agriculture. Two colonies were identified in 2003, one in 2004, eight in 2005 and 11 in 2006.
Denise Feiber, a U.S. Food and Drug Administration spokeswoman, said she didn’t have full 2007 or 2008 statistics on hand.
By Wednesday afternoon, only a few bees drifted around the crawl space, where the once white comb had collapsed in the dirt below.
Reading, the neighbor, said he was a little surprised at all the stinging.
“You rile ‘em up, yeah,” he said. “Usually honeybees don’t do that.”
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