San Francisco - January 3rd, 2012 by Long John
The buzz going around is that the cause for "Zombie Bees" in the SF Bay Area has been discovered...
It sounds like a science fiction movie with special effects by Ray Harryhausen...but it's not...and IF you're a honey bee it could be your worst nightmare...
John Hafernik, a biology professor at San Francisco State College and his student assistants have discovered a parasite that causes this fatal problem...
A type of fly is the culpret...it lays it's eggs inside honey bees, and the resulting fly maggots then start eating the bee from the inside...making the bee go beserk and exhibit strange behavior, and in the meantime the maggots escape from the bee's body, presumably to mature into adult flies...
Symtoms of the bees is they sometimes start walking around in circles, or stumble around...and then the infected bees leave the hive at night and fly towards light...
Prof Hafernik isn't sure if the bees leave the hive to protect the rest of the bee colony, or if they're "under control of the parasite"...
The discovery happened quite by accident, when in 2008 bees were collected to feed a Praying Mantis, and discovered more than just dead bees in the container...it also contained fly larvae that were in the last stage of metamorphis before becoming adult flies...
Hafernik's research team found the fly parasite in 80 percent of 31 hives surveyed around the San Francisco Bay Area...except in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties...
Experts aren't sure to what degree this is part of the larger problem of "bee colony collapse" because there's several diseases that could be affecting the bees...mites have also been suspected...
Source: KPIX-TV-5 (http://www.cbssf.com/) 11:oo PM News Jan 3rd, 2012 at about 11:16 PM)
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