PASCAGOULA, Miss. – A swarm of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of bees in, attacked an 80-year-old man and killed his pet beagle Thursday, and agriculture officials said it could be the state’s first brush with the infamous Africanized “killer” bees.

“Bees were all over the place out here, all along for a couple of blocks back, flying through there,” said Robert Cherry, who was stung six times in the head. “They just went wild.”

Cherry was wheeling a garbage can back to his house when he saw a cloud of bees attacking his dog, Theo. When he rushed out to the pen to save the beagle, Cherry was stung and had to retreat. The dog had been stung more than 1,000 times.

State entomologist Harry Fulton said, “This is an isolated incident, we hope.”

Fulton said agriculture officials took samples from the bees, which were sprayed and killed by a local pesticide operation and are trying to determine the genetic makeup.

He said the swarm might have come in on a boat in the Pascagoula harbor and tried to colonize at Cherry’s home, where other bees had lived for a year or so.

Buckets full of bees were destroyed and removed from the property, and state officials should know by next week if they are the real Africanized honeybees.

Africanized bees are the product of a 1957 experiment to bolster honey production in Brazil. But a swarm of the small, aggressive bees escaped a laboratory and flew north.

Such bees were discovered in Baton Rouge, La., three years ago, and found near Tioga, La., in January.

Allen Fabre, Louisiana coordinator of bee programs, said in January: “I think they’ll be to the Mississippi line by the end of 2009.”

Fulton urges residents not disturb or attempt to dispose of bee colonies, but instead to call pesticide or agriculture officials. He said if it turns out the bees that killed Theo are Africanized, “It means the public is going to have to be educated.”Cherry has been around bees all his life. Growing up on a farm, he would commonly extract fresh honey from combs.

“This is the first time I’ve ever had a bunch be wild,” he said. “It’s kinda bad. (Theo) was young. He would have lived a long time.”