Hunted / Season 1, Episode 11
The Swarm
APEX Season 1, Episode 11: "The Swarm" --- [CHAPTER 1: THE CALL] The 911 call came in at 3:47 PM on a Thursday afternoon in August. "There's bees everywhere. Thousands of them. They're attacking the ranch—they killed the horses, they killed the dogs, they—" The line went dead. When paramedics reached the Fulton Ranch, eighteen miles outside Tucson, they found four people dead: the ranch owner, his wife, and two hired hands. The bodies were covered in so many stings that the medical examiner initially estimated thousands of individual punctures per victim. That estimate was revised upward. Way upward. Dr. Marcus Chen arrived the next morning, summoned by the Arizona Department of Agriculture. He was the leading entomologist specializing in Africanized honey bees—the so-called "killer bees" that had migrated north from Brazil over the past fifty years. But what he found at the Fulton Ranch wasn't any killer bee he'd ever studied. The swarm was still present, clustered in a massive formation on the side of the main barn. Marcus estimated their number at over one hundred thousand—ten times the size of a normal hive. And they were organized in patterns he'd never seen before. "This isn't typical Africanized behavior," he told the agriculture officials. "These bees aren't just aggressive. They're coordinated." "What does that mean?" Marcus watched the swarm...