BEEING CAREFUL; COUNTY INSPECTOR ALERT FOR KILLER BEES.

Byline: Douglas Haberman Daily News Staff Writer

John Hurley is suited up in his white protective coveralls, rubber boots, gloves that reach to the elbow and a sort of pith helmet with a fine mesh veil hanging all around from the brim. He is flicking a small net on a stick.

It's not butterflies he is chasing, it's bees.

His mission: to find out if yet another Los Angeles County neighborhood has been colonized by dangerous Africanized honey bees, to see if another black dot needs to be marked on the county's map of killer bee colonies.

Hurley is the county's lone bee inspector. In the battle to inform the public about Africanized honey bees, Hurley is part reconnaissance man, part scientist, part educator.

``This isn't a job a lot of people are trying to get,'' he said. ``I love this job. I think bees are fascinating.''

Hurley said he is happy to be teaching the public to avoid a potential danger while allaying their wildest fears.

``The bees are a fact,'' he said. ``They're going to be a day-to-day reality in Los Angeles County. It's not the end of the world.''

Hurley, 51, has short red hair going white on the fringes and the ruddy complexion of a fair-skinned person who spends a lot of time in the sun. He wears oversize, squarish glasses and a badge on his light green khaki shirt that says ``Inspector.''

He grew up marveling at bugs and graduated in January 1975 from California State University, Long Beach, with a bachelor's degree in entomology. He hired on with the county Department of Agricultural Commissioner as an inspector trainee and has been there in numerous capacities ever since. He's been the bee inspector since summer 1997.

On a recent day, he was at a small, white stucco house in Artesia. At an opening in a side wall where an air conditioner might once have sat, from behind a piece of fiberboard meant to cover the gap, bees are coming and going. Nearby is a blossoming orange tree.

Hurley snares four to six bees in his net in several rapid swipes, then kneels on the concrete driveway and forces the bees into a small plastic bottle filled with alcohol. They quickly die.

He knocks on the wall and taps on the fiberboard to draw more bees out. They don't act aggressively; they don't attack the way Africanized bees are known to when they are defending a colony.

``This is pretty mild,'' he said.

Bees often live in walls

He collects more than 40 of the bees.

Tenant Guadalupe Lopez said in Spanish that he first saw the bees two years ago, then they left. Then about a year ago they returned.

``I think there's honey in there,'' Lopez said, looking at the wall from which the bees are emerging.

``There is honey in there,'' Hurley said when told of Lopez's remark. He estimates about 10,000 bees are in the wall, which are popular places for bees to call home.

Hurley tells Lopez the house's owner needs to hire a pest control operator to remove the bees.

Hurley's next stop is a Long Beach house whose owner had told county officials she's seen numerous bees, dead and alive, on her property. But Hurley finds no evidence of a colony.

``Bee careful!'' a GTE crew member working at the house jokingly warns Hurley as he's heading back to his county truck.

Hurley shakes his head. ``If I had a nickel for every time I've heard that, I could retire,'' he said.

Gets stung frequently

Hurley does get stung frequently, he said. Once he was taking a television news crew out with him. He was wearing black socks. He didn't put rubber boots on. He was stung six to eight times on each ankle.

``The swelling went down within a couple days,'' he said.

Only after the incident, he adds, did his predecessor tell him that bees attack black because it's the color of the muzzles of animals, such as bears, that will eat their honey.

Hurley uses a Benadryl ``pencil'' to reduce the swelling, pain and itching that accompany bee stings. ``I keep it in the truck,'' he said.

Loves the outdoors

Hurley loves being outdoors. But his job also requires considerable time on the telephone with other agencies and with the public.

``There's so many junk calls,'' he said, referring to calls by people who think they could be dealing with killer bees but are actually dealing with something completely different.

``It doesn't look like any bee I've ever seen'' is what these callers often tell him, he said. And that's often because they aren't looking at honey bees but at yellowjackets or wasps or carpenter bees or even green fig beetles. Africanized honey bees look just like European honey bees to the naked eye.

Hurley doesn't just field calls from residents, he also goes out, days and evenings, to educate groups about the killer bees.

``I talk to everybody from kindergarten classes to Kiwanis,'' he said. After the trip to Artesia and Long Beach, Hurley returns to his office in El Monte. In the entomology lab, he plucks the right forewings off 10 of the 40 bees from Artesia with a pair of tweezers and measures them under a microscope. The wings are too long - averaging more than 9 mm each - for the bees to be Africanized.

``These were European,'' he said.

If they had seemed Africanized, he would have shipped the bees up to the state Department of Food and Agriculture in Sacramento for DNA testing.

And if testing had confirmed they were Africanized, one more black dot would have darkened the county's map of the killer bees.

CAPTION(S):

3 Photos

PHOTO (1) L.A. County bee inspector John Hurley uses a net to collect a 50-bee sample for analysis in his lab for traits of Africanized bees.

(2) This sample of bees in alcohol was collected by bee inspector John Hurley in Artesia.

(3) L.A. County bee inspector John Hurley suits up in white protective clothing, rubber boots, gloves and a helmet with mesh hanging from the brim. He takes bee samples back to his lab for analysis because Africanized bees can't be distinguishedH visually from European bees.

David Sprague/Daily News