They fly by night. Zombees. It's not a joke. It might be serious, yet another thing to make life more difficult for bees and beekeepers. Discovered by accident in 2012 by researchers from San Francisco State University, zombie bees have been found in three-quarters of thirty-one hives surveyed in the Bay Area, some of them belonging to fellow beekeepers who live nearby.
A parasitic fly called Apocephalus borealis normally infects bumblebees and wasps, but has recently made the jump to honey bees as well. What they do is not pretty: the fly deposits eggs into a bee's abdomen. As the larvae hatch, the bees become confused and zombielike, walking in endless circles by day, and leaving the hive at night, something they normally would not do. Once outside in the dark, they are attracted to the nearest street lamp, yard light, or lit window, flying obsessively against it. Their bodies can be found in the morning under light sources.
A few days later, the former larvae emerge as flies and take wing, ready to find new victims.
BEES: IT'S WHAT'S FOR DINNER?
I remember reading, when I was a mid-sized kid, that way off in the future—like maybe even as soon as 1980 or 1990, before we all emigrated to the moon and Mars in 2001—we'd be eating lots of delicious insects, including “bee burgers” made from honey bees. This was in the Weekly Reader, that required-reading tabloid that for many years was delivered into elementary school classrooms across the nation. I was both intrigued and grossed out about that, and the memory remains with me a half-century after.
But why not? Bees are a renewable protein source that requires no soybeans or grain, no pasture space, no special handling of odiferous waste. So, curious in the present day, I did the obligatory Google search for honey bee recipes. I wasn't surprised to get pages of hits, but 1.4 million? The top hits were for cakes and cookies. But why not? If you're going to insinuate insects (or anything) into the American diet, it's going to be through its sweets. This definitely looked like a trend worth checking out.
Except it wasn't. You probably guessed. These weren't baked goods made of bees; these were baked goods shaped like bees. And not even real bees, but cute cartoony bees.
Sigh. We never made it to Mars, either.