MONSTERQUEST - Giant Killer Bees

History Channel - Original Air Date: 2/3/10

Another giant animal version of MQ?  (Can the show do anything besides big animals and bigfoot?)  The killer bees are coming!  (And, no John Belushi is not with them.)  But we get the usual scary stories, the usual monster hunters, and the usual recreations & CGI.  The show cleverly blurs the distinction between "giant" bees and "giant swarms of bees" in a little bit of bait-and-switch.  The hunters give some pretty scary live demonstrations of hive swarm attacks - and even their bee-proof suits cannot stop all the stings.  The super aggressive bees pursue the team more than 1/2 mile from the hive, giving one researcher 40 stings through his suit.  So, this can be a real problem, and sadly it is a man-made problem, resulting when African bees were deliberately bred with American honeybees.  Rather than creating a super honey maker, the experiment created a super predator swarm.  The bees have been heading north from South America ever since, eventually reaching the US southwest.  The fear now is that cross-breeding will allow the bees to live even in northern, wintry climes.  There's not a lot of good news in this show (and nary an actual giant bee in sight), and certainly the bees are currently dangerous in the US Southwest.  But whether killer bees will become a reality in Chicago, New York, or Seattle remains to . . . bee seen.