ZOMBIE BEES SPREAD TO WASHINGTON STATE

 

Apocephalus borealis maggot emerges from the body of its host, the common honeybee.

By NBC News and the Associated Press

I certainly hope that these scientists, amateur and otherwise, take the increased amount of invisible garbage in our air when considering the weakness of bees that is allowing this blight of parasites to take over hives at this rate.  The invisible soup of chemtrails, radioactive and nuclear fallout, electronic material, and of course GMO’s surely contribute to this situation. Just yesterday on the film presented on GMO’s the collapse of honey bees is well documented.

The zombees are spreading.

Or rather, “zombie bees” ~ honey bees that have been inhabited by tiny flies that cause them to abandon their hive at night and lurch about erratically before dying. 

"They basically eat the insides out of the bee," said San Francisco State University biologist John Hafernik.

Hafernik first discovered zombie bees in 2008 in California and now uses a website to recruit citizen scientists to track the infection across the country.

The zombee condition recently crept into Washington State. Novice beekeeper Mark Hohn spotted bees jerking about outside his suburban Seattle home.

ZombeeWatch.org, managed by John Hafernik at San Francisco State University, solicits information from citizen scientists, beekeepers and enthusiasts to track zombie bees.

"I joke with my kids that the zombie apocalypse is starting at my house," Hohn said.

Hohn collected several of the corpses and popped them into a plastic bag. 

About a week later, he had evidence his bees were infected: the pupae of parasitic flies. They were the first to be confirmed in Washington State, The Seattle Times reported.

The infection could be another threat to bees needed to pollinate crops. Hives have been failing in recent years due to a mysterious ailment called colony collapse disorder, which causes all the adult honey bees in a colony to suddenly die.

Still, there’s no evidence that the parasitic fly is to blame, said Steve Sheppard, chairman of the entomology department at Washington State University.

The fly-bee relationship is a strange one: The flies, discovered in Maine in 1924, are native to North America. Honey bees ~ what scientists call the “beneficial insect” ~are not.

So why haven’t the flies feasted on honey bees before now?

“We don’t really know if this is something the flies have figured out recently or if it’s been under the radar,” Hafernik told NBC News.

It’s possible this behavior has gone undetected ~ after all, infected bees abandon their hives at night, when beekeepers aren’t around to notice.

But Hafernik has trouble believing that dedicated beekeepers and scientists have gone decades without noticing infected bees.

In the San Francisco Bay Area, Hafernik said, up to 78 percent of hives are infected, and a number are infected across the Pacific Northwest. Scientists conducted DNA analysis on bees found traces of parasites in bees in South Dakota; there have also been cases in New York, Minnesota and Colorado. 

“It could be that not all honey bee strains are susceptible to the fly at the same rate ~ there could be some genetics among the honeybees that could be brought to bear,” Hafernik said.

He hopes that scientists and beekeepers will send information to his website, ZombeeWatch.org, so that his team may better research the problem.

Hafernik said that those suspecting zombie bees should isolate the bee for about a week as Hohn did ~ the bee will die within a day or two if infected. After five to seven days, maggots will have finished their feeding and emerge from the bee’s head ~ those look like small, brown, crystal-shaped pupae. Take photos, he asks, and send them along.

Hafernik will also be taking notes. After a recent vacation, he found that a colony of infected bees had moved into a crevice next to his house.

“They’re now living between the walls of my house,” he said. “I decided to leave them. For the moment, we’re coexisting peacefully.” 

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FLY PARASITE 

TURNS HONEYBEES 

INTO ZOM-BEES

Some bees leave their hives, then dying after wandering about in a stupor

By Joseph Castro

LiveScience Staff Writer

January 3, 2012

Reposted: September 25, 2012

If deadly viruses and fungi weren't enough, honeybees in North America now must also deal with a fly parasite that causes them to leave their hive and die after wandering about in a zombie-like stupor, a new study shows.

Scientists previously found that the parasitic fly, Apocephalus borealis, infects and ultimately kills bumblebees and paper wasps, while the "decapitating fly," an insect in the same genus, implants its eggs in ants, whose heads then pop off after the fly larvae devour the ants' brains and dissolve their connective tissues.

Now researchers have discovered honeybees parasitized by A. borealis in 24 of 31 sites across the San Francisco Bay area, as well as other commercial hives in California and South Dakota.

Genetic tests revealed that some of the bees and flies were infected with deformed wing virus and the fungus Nosema ceranae, both of which have been implicated in colony collapse disorder (CCD). The scientists believe that more research into the parasitized bees and their behavior could yield new insights into the devastating disorder.

"Understanding causes of the hive abandonment behavior we document could explain symptoms associated with CCD," the researchers write in their study, published today (Jan. 3) in the journal PLoS One.

AN INFECTIOUS FLY

The female A. borealis flies will inject their eggs into a honeybee's abdomen soon after coming into contact with the bee, the researchers saw in their laboratory. About seven days later, up to 25 mature fly larvae emerge from the area between the bee's head and thorax. In the wild, no more than 13 larvae were observed busting from a single honeybee. 
 .

The researchers found that parasitized bees in the wild abandon their hives and congregate near light sources, where they begin to behave strangely. A bee near death typically will sit in one place and curl up, but these infected bees walked around in circles, appearing disoriented and with little equilibrium, often not being able to stand up.

"They kept stretching [their legs] out and then falling over," Andrew Core, biology graduate student at San Francisco State University and co-author of the study, said in a statement. "It really painted a picture of something like a zombie."

Core and his colleagues found that the honeybees most likely to become infected by the parasite were the ones that left their hives to forage at night, rather than the daytime foragers. The researchers also discovered fly pupae near dead bees at the bottom of their laboratory hive, suggesting that A. borealis can multiply within a hive and potentially infect a pregnant queen bee.

MANY QUESTIONS STILL REMAIN

It's currently unclear how the flies are changing the bees' behavior, though the researchers hypothesize that the flies somehow affect the bees' circadian rhythm, or natural day/night cycle. The researchers also don't know whether infected bees are leaving the hive to protect other bees, or whether hive mates sense the infection and force the dying bees out.

"A lot of touching and tasting goes on in a hive," lead researcher John Hafernik said in a statement. "And it's certainly possible that their co-workers are finding them and can tell that there's something wrong with them."

Perhaps most important, scientists don't yet understand the role, if any, that the parasitic flies play in the transmission of the CCD pathogens. Are the flies further harming the bees by spreading deformed wing virus and N. ceranae, or do they actually prevent the pathogens from multiplying by quickly killing their hosts?

Whatever the case, the researchers believe A. borealis is likely a new threat for the honeybees. "Honeybees are among the best-studied insects in the world," Hafernik said. "So at one level, we would expect that if this has been a long-term parasite of honeybees, we would have noticed."