13 February 2014
The New York Times broke the story in late 2012. There
are zombie bees. Discovered in California in 2008 by John Hafernik,
a professor of biology at San Francisco State University, zombie bees keep
spreading.
Of course, if zombie bees were going to “appear” somewhere, I wasn’t
surprised that it turned out to be California. Then, they were reported
in Washington State. Why not Oregon? Actually, they had spread
stealthily into Oregon with reports only surfacing well after the “zom-bees” (I
couldn’t resist) were a well-publicized fact to the north, in the state of
Washington.
But the next appearance puzzled me. North Dakota seemed like
the last place I’d expect to meet a zombie. But that was the next state in
which the “zom-bees” appeared. The zombie horror genre had conditioned me to
imagine brain-eating zombies in California. And the “real” zombie lore
might suggest the Caribbean. But North Dakota just doesn’t have the
“feel” of a hotspot for zombie anything. But, now, its becoming clear
that the “zom-bees” feel free to fly
wherever they want.
And their latest flight has taken them from South Dakota to Burlington,
Vermont. There, amateur beekeeper Anthony Cantrell began finding dead
bees near his home. One can only imagine his “horror” when he discovered
a close match between the behavior of his dying bees and a description on ZomBeeWatch.org, the website belonging
Hafernik and his colleagues. Dr. Van Helsing, er, ah, I mean, Professor
Hafernik soon confirmed that, indeed, Cantrell’s bees had been zombified!
The bee version of a zombie needs its own description. They
aren’t really much like the brain-eating zombies created by Hollywood.
And, then, there are the “real” zombies. At least, the real belief in
zombies that goes with a belief in Voodoo. But neither the “zombies” of
Hollywood or Voodoo exactly match our zombie bees. Still, when you
hear how zombie bees behave, you’ll understand why “zombie” was picked as the
best way to describe the fate of these poor insects.
The zombie bee falls victim to a parasitic fly, apocephalus
borealis. The fly lays its eggs physically inside the bee’s body.
Then, the eggs actually affect the bee’s behavior. However, the eggs and
larvae of the apocephalus borealis fly control the bee’s “mind,” only briefly,
before causing its death.
Under the influence of the developing fly larvae, the honeybee abandons its
exclusively daytime routine and does something a bee doesn’t do — flies at
night. Just before, and during, this “last flight” into the night, (what
Hafernik calls “the flight of the living dead,") the bee begins to move
erratically. It ends its final flight in death. Only then, do the
fly larvae eat their way out of the dead bee to continue their growth to
maturity.
Cantrell reported that, at a recent meeting of the Vermont Beekeepers
Association, Steve Parise, an agriculture production specialist with the
Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets, discussed the threat posed by
zombie bees. The Agency is considering trapping bees to investigate the
zombie bee threat.
The culprit fly was originally discovered in the 1920s, in Maine. Since
that time, it has spread across the United States. The fly was
a known parasite of bumblebees and yellow jacket hornets. But zombification of its host wasn’t part of
the parasitic process. And the fly left
honeybees alone. At least, it did until 2008, when the fly changed.
Now, the fly is more than just a honeybee parasite. Not only do the
fly’s eggs and larvae feed off the honeybee, they turn the victim into a
zombie.
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