Company History
Our parent company is a large, Tucson based commercial beekeeping company called Arizona Bee Products. It has been in business since the 1970s. It is a very progressive, sophisticated, honey and pollen producing commercial beekeeping company. One of its founders is Thomas Martin. He also founded the bee removal company, AAA Africanized Bee Removal Specialists, Inc. for our parent company and is the president of our company. That was in January of 1993. It was clear to Thomas Martin and others in our parent company that African honeybees were going to quickly expand into Arizona. For over 40 years Thomas Martin has been a commercial beekeeper. During the 1970s, he worked as an apicultural researcher for the US Department of Agriculture at the USDA Carl Hayden Honeybee Research Laboratory in Tucson, Arizona. He gained extensive knowledge about bees, their behavior and characteristics through his beekeeping experiences and his work at that USDA Federal Bee Lab.
In the late 1970s, Thomas Martin left the Bee Lab to do field beekeeping research for the private sector. He was hired by Arizona Bee Products. Thomas Martin has worked for them ever since. Commercial beekeeping is extremely hard work, especially in Arizona. It was clear to Tom that once African honeybees crossed the Arizona border, beekeeping in Arizona would likely change forever. A progressive beekeeping company would have to be prepared to deal with this invasive, aggressive species of honeybees. As Arizona law requires a company to be a licensed pest control company in order to control any pest, the chore of becoming a pest control company was undertaken in early 1993. Hence, our company AAA Africanized Bee Removal Specialists, Inc. was founded and completed the rigorous endeavor of becoming a Licensed Pest Control Company.
African honeybees were first found in the United States in Hidalgo, Texas in 1990, where they stung and killed a man mowing his lawn on a riding mower. As United States researchers watched the African bee population expand through Mexico, it was estimated that the expansion moved approximately 200 miles a year. Using that data, it was originally estimated that African honeybees would arrive in Arizona at the Mexican border in 1995. Logically, it was felt that the first find would be near Douglas, Arizona or Sasabe, Arizona. Both of these communities are border towns with significant international traffic.
Hence, it was a shock to researchers and beekeepers alike to learn that the first colony of African honeybees found in Arizona was a colony that had become very well established in Tucson, in early June of 1993. This colony stung and killed a large dog and had become entrenched in the hollow aspect of the roof of a home on Tucson’s west side. Thomas Martin, our company president, removed this colony. As this was two years earlier than expected, USDA and Arizona Department of Agriculture researchers scrambled to set out bait-trap-hives in the adjacent neighborhoods in an effort to ascertain if this was a lone colony that had perhaps “hitchhiked” noth bound on a Mexican truck, or if the natural expansion had occurred without the US and Arizona Departments of Agriculture’s detection. It was quickly concluded that this colony was not the only African colony in Tucson and surrounding areas.
Initially, Thomas Martin and others in our parent company, Arizona Bee Products, believed that some, if not most of the colonies of African honeybees found could be captured and de-queened, wherein the worker bees could be integrated into individual queen-right European bee colonies. For three years, from 1993 to 1996, this procedure is what our company and parent company focused on.
Unfortunately, during this 3 year period, especially in 1996, several stinging attacks occurred from colonies of African honeybees that we saved, having integrated them into our beekeeping operation. As a result, our parent company lost numerous, long-standing beekeeping sites. Therefore, a company decision was made to cease integrating African worker bees into our colonies, and, therefore, we quit saving these colonies. To our knowledge, we were the last company in Arizona which saved these bees. At that time, we had already been exterminating colonies that had become established in structural cavities in dwellings and buildings. Our employees were then and still are very well trained beekeepers with the specialized knowledge and expertise that can only be gained through working in a real beekeeping operation. We developed extensive first-hand knowledge of the characteristics and behaviors of Africanized Honeybees, , apis mellifera scutellata.
One can easily conclude that our company individuals have a vast and detailed knowledge of beekeeping and bee extermination. We believe that the additional expertise, knowledge and thoroughness provided by our specialists more than makes up for any price difference that may initially be noted between our company and some of our competitors. We are confident that the work that we perform and the timeliness of our response to each job is worth the price we charge and that a customer’s experience with our company will always be worthwhile. If you have read this article, mention promotion code “Longhorn” and we will give you a fifty dollar cash discount off your next bee service- if you mention it before we collect payment. Please take the time to examine the rest of our website so you can have an even better understanding of the difficult nature of this business and the specialized tasks being performed by AAA Africanized Bee Removal Specialists, Inc.
