More "Zombie Bees" Found

Mark Hohn didn't pay much attention to the dead bees scattered outside his shop when he got home from vacation a few weeks ago. He just pulled out a leaf blower and blasted away the mess. It took him a few days to realize he had an invasion of the living dead on his hands. "I joke with my kids that the zombie apocalypse is starting at my house," said the novice beekeeper. The dead and dying honeybees from Hohn's 1.25-acre spread in Kent are the first in Washington confirmed to be infected by a parasitic fly that causes the bees to lurch around erratically before dropping dead. The discovery expands the range of the so-called "zombie bees" first discovered in California in 2008 by San Francisco State University biologist John Hafernik. Through his website ZombeeWatch.org, Hafernik is recruiting a network of citizen scientists, like Hohn, to help determine how widespread the parasite is and whether it is contributing to the demise of bee colonies across the country. Unlike healthy bees, which spend the night tucked up in their hive, infected bees fly after dark and tend to congregate at lights. Hohn noticed bees buzzing around the light in his shop, flying in jerky patterns and finally flopping on the floor. The fly's life cycle is gruesomely reminiscent of the movie "Alien" — though they don't pose a risk to people. Adult females, smaller than a fruit fly, land on the backs of foraging honeybees and use their needle-sharp ovipositors to inject eggs into the bee's abdomen. The eggs hatch into maggots. "They basically eat the insides out of the bee," Hafernik said. In a twist on the typical horror-movie plot, it's the parasite that's native to North America, not the bees. Honeybees were imported by European settlers. The flies, called Apocephalus borealis or scuttle flies, are common coast to coast. But until Hafernik picked up dying honeybees outside his San Francisco laboratory four years ago, the flies had never been known to infect anything but bumblebees and certain types of wasps...more