A NERVOUS India was last week gripped by fears that it was under attack from chemical weapons. For two days, green rain fell from the sky on the town of Sangrampur, east of Calcutta, spattering clothes and buildings. Villagers rushed to temples to pray, and warnings spread that the rain could be contaminated with toxins or chemical warfare agents. But to everyone鈥檚 relief, the cause turned out to be altogether more innocent. The villages were being bombed by bees, and they were using excrement.
Shortly after the 鈥渁ttack鈥�, Deepak Chakraborty, chief pollution scientist of West Bengal, reported that the mysterious yellow-green droplets were in fact bee faeces, full of pollen from local mangoes and coconuts. He said the coloured droplets that hit the town may have been caused by a mass migration of a large swarm of giant Asian honeybees, whose propensity for producing 鈥済olden showers鈥� is well known to bee biologists. Or the faeces may have washed off leaves during the first monsoon rains. Either way, panic over.
The headlines brought back memories of a bizarre and sinister story that emerged from the jungles of South-East Asia in 1981. Then the US Pentagon claimed that similar spatterings of 鈥測ellow rain鈥� in the remote border region between Laos and Cambodia were evidence of Soviet-inspired biological warfare.
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The apparent discovery of biological warfare agents excited defence analysts and brought long articles in The Wall Street Journal analysing the threat. The Reagan administration even accused Russia of violating arms control agreements. But while it took Indian scientists less than 48 hours to find the source, it was not until 1987 that biochemist Matthew Meselson proved to most people鈥檚 satisfaction that the yellow rain was non-toxic bee faeces.