Word: brazilianizing
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...Paulo. He was building and racing go-karts at 15, speedy competition cars by the time he was 20. At 22, he put together $3,300 and left Brazil for Britain to break into big-time European racing. Today, little more than three years later, Brazilian Emerson Fittipaldi is the most successful race-car driver in the world. Last week he wheeled his Lotus around the 3.51-mile track at Monza, Italy, to win both the Formula 1 Italian Grand Prix and 1972's World Championship of Drivers.† At 25, he is the youngest driver ever to earn...
Like an insect version of Genghis Khan, the fierce Brazilian bees are coming. Millions of them are swarming northward from the Amazon basin at the rate of 200 miles a year, liquidating passive colonies of native bees in their path, quick to sting-and sometimes kill-any unwary animal or person. At their present rate they will conquer all of South America in the next ten years, and start to invade Central America. Unless stopped by man, the bees will eventually invade Mexico and the southern...
Ironically, it was man who loosed the troublesome bee in the first place. In 1956 Warwick Kerr, a Brazilian geneticist in the state of Sāo Paulo, decided to breed the perfect honey-producing bee. He wanted to combine the best attributes of the hard-working but highly aggressive African bee (Apis mellifera adansonii) with gentler but lazier European strains. Before the hybridization could occur, 26 swarms of African bees accidentally escaped, mated with native bees, flourished and spread. The offspring, known as Brazilian honey bees, are precisely what Kerr wanted to avoid; they have inherited none...
Wherever it goes, the Brazilian strain attracts attention-most of it bad. When provoked, even by the vibrations caused by nearby farm machinery, the bee releases a hormone chemical that starts it off on a sort of kamikaze attack on anything that moves. The bees are now officially blamed for the deaths of ten Brazilians (one farm worker near Rio de Janeiro succumbed to more than 1,000 stings) and, unofficially, for any bee "bite" anywhere in Brazil. Even horses, mules and chickens have been killed by them. Nonetheless, they produce quantities of honey, and intrepid beekeepers raise them, though...
...block its advance, the report recommends setting up a kind of anti-bee Maginot Line across the natural bottleneck of Central America. All it would take is the development of a completely new species whose dominant traits would make it "relatively unaggressive, nonswarming, nonmigratory and equal to the Brazilian bee in foraging activity." This "genetic barrier" would in effect tame the Brazilian bee by breeding out the worst qualities...