In this story from the weekend reported by the Guardian (and others) the culprits are reported to be Cape honeybees (A.m.capensis) That's surprising as they are supposed to be a docile lot, but they are known to hybridise with scutellata, just not there. For those who don't know this bee, Cape honeybee workers are known to produce maybe as much as 10% diploid worker brood, whereas in other bee strains workers only produce a little haploid brood.
Moved to other parts of S Africa Cape bees have been seen as 'parasites' in scutellata colonies, their queen eventually taking over the colony, but even so I didn't think they were agressive. It just goes to show a) bees don't read books and, b) 'docile' is a relative term, and any bees can be nasty in the right circumstances.
Oh, and the penguins were members of an endangered species. #####!
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Moved to other parts of S Africa Cape bees have been seen as 'parasites' in scutellata colonies, their queen eventually taking over the colony, but even so I didn't think they were agressive. It just goes to show a) bees don't read books and, b) 'docile' is a relative term, and any bees can be nasty in the right circumstances.
Oh, and the penguins were members of an endangered species. #####!
Bees kill 63 endangered penguins in South Africa
Postmortems showed the African penguins had multiple stings around their eyes
