I gotta laugh at this story. Reporters show up to cover the removal of a large colony in El Paso, TX. They had suited up for the story, but I don’t think the beekeepers told them that you can still be stung through a bee suit. (It just helps.)

On Tuesday morning, bee specialist Pyong Livingston tried to extract the hive. He said he doesn’t want to kill the bees, just move them out of the area. But his work Tuesday made the bees mad. KFOX14 photojournalist, Rudy Reyes, got stung at least eight times when he was recording video of the crew trying to remove the hive.

I truly hope that Rudy is okay. Being stung is no fun and eight stings is starting to get serious even for people with a mild reaction to the stings.

Some things to remember about Africanized bees:

1. There is nothing different from the sting of an Africanized bee compared to a normal bee. They’re just a bit more protective of their hive and turn aggressive quicker.
2. Africanized bees make great honey and a large amount of it. A very appealing quality to an otherwise ill-tempered hive.
3. Africanized bees have good mite hygene behavior where they will clean mites off of each other. Other “gentler” bees haven’t been commonly bred for this behavior … yet.
4. To turn an aggressive hive into a gentle hive, the beekeepers will replace their queen with a queen that produces gentle bees. This hive can turn “gentle” in about a month.
5. We don’t have Africanized bees in North Georgia, USA. It gets too cold for them in the winter and they can’t survive here.

Read more here: News3LasVegas: One million killer bees are threatening an entire neighborhood in far east El Paso, Texas