Zombees. They really do exist, I'm not kidding. When a regular honeybee is infected by the parasitic maggots of the scuttle fly, the maggot uses mind control to make the bee abandon its hive at night and cluster near outdoor lights wandering in increasingly erratic circles until it dies.
Well, mind control is one theory anyway. The other theory is that the bees are purposely committing suicide in order to protect the rest of the hive from being infected.
John Hafernik, an entomologist at San Francisco State University, has started tagging infected bees with tiny radio frequency identification tags (about the size of a single piece of glitter) which will tell them when the bee leaves the hive and whether or not it returns. The idea is that if the bees are abandoning the hive at all times of the day, they are committing suicide whereas if they are only leaving at night, they are being controlled by the parasite. The explanation is that bees don't normally leave their hives at night.
Researchers are hoping that this will help us to understand colony collapse disorder. Which is a disease that makes bees abandon their hives and has devastated the U.S. honeybee population.
**Now here's the part where you get to laugh at me a bit- I've been hearing about the disappearance of honeybees for quite awhile now, but I thought that it was a Doctor Who reference, so I didn't pay much attention to it. (To those of you poor saps who aren't Whovians, here's a clip.)
If you see potential "zombees" you can upload pictures to ZomBeeWatch.org. This will help researchers to map the spread of the parasite.
