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Issue date: 3/4/10 Section: Opinion

Robinson

Mentioning that awful movie The Swarm last week caused some flashbacks to a time when the menace of the killer bees seemed quite real and immediate. Of course I was just a kid in the 1970s, so I'm sure a lot of dangers seemed real and immediate even if they weren't. Still, there was something chilling about the killer bees back then.

A lot of my dread was overactive imagination, but my reaction wasn't based on nothing. In addition to producer Irwin "Master of Disaster" Allen's movie about bees going after Michael Caine and a host of older actors (you should watch the trailer on YouTube, it's a riot), there were plenty of news stories. There was also an episode of In Search Of… about the killer bees. If Leonard Nimoy, Trek's Mr. Spock himself, narrated something, well I believed it.

Sensationalism seemed to be the rule and the emphasis was always on two points. First, the killer bees would kill. Ordinary bees can kill too, especially people allergies to bees. These bees were angry killers. Don't mess with them, they're bloodthirsty murderers. Second, and more importantly, the bees were making their way north. After escaping from experimental labs in South America the bees were slowly expanding their territory towards the U.S. To my young mind the progression was obvious. After Mexico and Texas, the next step was clearly Cape St. Claire, Maryland.

As anybody who grew up in the Cape can testify, you can't drink an open soda outdoors there without a bee getting into the can. Annoying under normal circumstances, but during a killer bee occupation, shooing a bee out of Shasta could become the first step in summoning a lethal swarm of bees down upon the soda drinker. This seemed profoundly unfair to my young mind.

Of course, the killer bee threat never did manage to manifest itself in the Cape. Neither did a lot of other things I worried about at the time, including Bigfoot walking over from the Pacific Northwest.

The killer bees did find a little niche in our popular culture though. One example was the classic Killer Bee skits on the old Saturday Night Live. In these bits, the actors on the show wore silly bee costumes, adopting the broad stereotypical attributes of Mexican banditos in Western movies. I didn't understand it at the time, but this was an astute criticism of both overreaction to the bees and cultural anxieties about illegal immigrants.

My favorite example of killer bee inspired pop culture is Swarm. Originally a foe of California's superhero team, the Champions, Swarm would go on to menace Spider-Man and others. Swarm was a former Nazi scientist whose body was destroyed and replaced by a colony of bees he controlled telepathically. Yes, he was made of bees. Swarm is utterly ridiculous yet somehow vaguely sinister. In that way, he's much like the phenomenon that inspired him. Killer bees do seem like a silly idea; right up until they're stinging you to death.

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