Tag Archives: honey
Fly turns honeybees into little zombies
Latest woe is horrific, but is not what’s crashing bee populations
zombie bee
A researcher at Oregon State University has reported Oregon’s first documented case of a “zombie” fly infecting a honeybee, but he doubts that the parasite at the moment poses a threat to the bee, which is a vital pollinator of some of the state’s key crops.
Ramesh Sagili, a honeybee specialist with the OSU Extension Service, stumbled upon a belly-up bee on a sidewalk under a street light on campus in Corvallis one morning in late July, according to a press release Tuesday from OSU. He placed it in a vial in his lab, and four days later seven maggots crawled out of the bee’s neck. Almost three weeks after that, one matured into an Apocephalus borealis fly, commonly called a zombie fly because of the disoriented behavior it is suspected of causing the bees to exhibit at night.
The finding comes amid rising concern about the health of honeybees, which have been hit by a mysterious phenomenon called colony collapse disorder in which adult honeybees disappear from a hive, either entirely or in large numbers. It came to light in late 2006 when beekeepers on the East Coast began to see their honeybee colonies dwindle. The disorder has since spread to other states. A cause has not been determined, but suspects include mites, viruses, malnutrition, pesticides, a lack of genetic diversity, and stress that results from commercial hives being trucked around the country to pollinate crops.
Sagili doubts that the fly is playing a role in the widespread die-off of honeybees, which are crucial pollinators for various Oregon crops, including blueberries, pears, cherries, apples, clover, cranberries and vegetable seeds.
“It’s a stretch to say the fly is correlated to colony collapse disorder,” he said. “At this point, I don’t think it’s a threat. I don’t think it’s at the level where it can depopulate hives in large numbers.”
Earlier this year in a journal article, researchers in California became the first to document that the fly attacks honeybees. They discovered the parasite in honeybees in California and South Dakota, the only states besides Oregon where fly-infected honeybees, or ZomBees, have been reported.
The fly is known to parasitize bumblebees but little is known about its impact on them in Oregon, said Sujaya Rao, an entomologist at OSU.
Sagili hypothesizes that the fly is just now being found in honeybees because it may be trying to branch out from its other hosts when they’re not available. He added that although honeybees are widely studied, it’s possible that scientists just never saw the parasite because they usually preserve their collected bees in alcohol, which would kill the larvae and keep them from popping out.
The brownish-red fly lays its eggs inside the bees and is smaller than a fruit fly, is native to North America and has been found in Canada and states including Alaska, Georgia, Maine, Minnesota, New Mexico and New York, said Brian Brown, the curator of entomology at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and an expert on the parasitic fly.
Brown said the fly has been in Oregon for thousands of years, but it just never has been found in a honeybee in the state until no
ZOMBIE OUTBREAK? – Are Zombie Bees Infiltrating Your Neighborhood?
Parasite zombie flies and a honeybee; courtesy of John Hafernik/SF State University
Zombie bees are not science fiction. They are real—and real threat to already-threatened U.S. honeybee populations.
Honeybees (Apis mellifera) in California and South Dakota have been observed acting zombielike, wandering away from their hives at night and crawling around blindly in circles.
These insects have been rendered insensate by a parasitizing fly that lays eggs in the bees’ bodies. After the bee dies a lonesome death, pupae crawl out and grow to adult flies that seek new bodies to infect.
Such a sight startled John Hafernik, a professor of biology at San Francisco State University, when he looked at dead honey bees he had collected on campus. He soon started noticing clumps of dead bees under light fixtures in the area. He and his colleagues found that this bizarre bee behavior was the result of the fly Apocephalus borealis (they described their findings in January in the journal PLoS ONE). After sampling hives around the Bay Area, they found that, disturbingly, more than three quarters were infected with this parasite.
Honeybee colonies have been collapsing at an alarming rate in the U.S. for the past several years. And without these important pollinators, many of our favorite foods, from almonds to zucchini would be difficult to produce. Scientists have implicated viruses, fungi, mites and other invaders in colony collapse disorder, but Hafernik suspects this parasite is a new villain on the scene. “Honeybees are among the best-studied insects,” he said in a prepared statement in January. “We would expect that if this has been a long-term parasite of honeybees, we would have noticed.”
How do you catch a zombie bee? A “ZomBee” trap; courtesy of John Hafernik/SF State University
Now, to see how far the zombified bee problem has spread, he and his colleagues are enlisting the help of the whole continent. They have launched ZomBeeWatch.org, a citizen science project that allows people to help them track suspicious bee behavior and collect specimens. Through the project, which launches in full today, they are hoping to find “if this parasitism is distributed widely across North America,” Hafernik said in a new statement.
To help out, you can sign up to collect sick-looking or dead bee specimens and observe them to see if parasite fly pupae emerge. Industrious citizen scientists can build light traps to attract any parasitized bees in their area (full instructions are on their site). And the researchers promise that even bees that do not turn out to be true “ZomBees” are important to report in an effort to better understand contributors to colony collapse.
“If we can enlist a dedicated group of citizen scientists to help us, together we can answer important questions and help honeybees at the same time,” Hafernik said.
Not sure what a zombie bee looks like? Here’s a video clip of a sick bee: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xs32DCaxU1U&feature=youtu.be (Read more about parasites that make their hosts act like zombies in the article “Zombie Creatures.”)
In case you’re wondering what we’ve been wondering—ahem, what else can these zombie flies infect?—ZomBee Watch has an answer: “The zombie fly only parasitizes insects and does not lay eggs on or in humans,” according to its website. “As far as we know, it does not transmit any diseases that are contractible by humans.” As far as we know…
Emergency Food Storage
The human body needs food, you cannot survive without it! In a doomsday scenerio You will not have access to ready foods from the grocery store. so to prepare for the worst you need to stock up on foods that can be stored for a long period of time such as This is a list with foods that are good to have in case of emergency. Beans, Legumes, Grains, Pasta, Honey, chocolate, tahini, vitamins, spices, herbs, water, cans, biscuits, oil, olives, salt, vinegar, nuts, seeds, canned fruits, dried fruits, preserves, juices.