Parasites who turn bees into "zombies" before finally killing them behind collapse of bee civilization?

From:
Parasitic fly creates “zombie bees” — a new factor explaining Colony Collapse Disorder
(Natural News) -- by Tara Green --

Researchers at a California university have found a parasitic fly which causes honeybees to become disoriented and abandon their hives before dying, behavior which made one of the researchers compare them to zombies. Scientists believe this may be a contributing factor to Colony Collapse Disorder, which has decimated honeybee populations, affecting the honey market and the pollination of crops as well as raising concern about environmental toxins.

The insect version of a horror movie

The parasitic flies were discovered by chance when John Hafernik, professor of biology at San Francisco State University, collected some dead bees, found under a light on campus, as food for a praying mantis he had just captured. “Being an absent-minded professor, I left them in a vial on my desk and forgot about them. Then the next time I looked at the vial, there were all these fly pupae surrounding the bees.”

The flies were later identified as Apocephalus borealis. The female A. borealis fly deposits its eggs into the bee’s abdomen, and about a week later, mature fly larvae emerge from the host’s head and thorax. Infected bees move their limbs in a jerky limb fashion and walk in circles. They leave their hives and seek bright lights as if they were moths rather than bees. They die shortly afterwards and as many as 13 parasite fly larvae may then crawl out from the body of their host.

One member of the research team, biology graduate student and study co-author Andrew Core, observed that the bees “kept . . . falling over. It really painted a picture of something like a zombie.” The researchers found that bees which leave the hive to forage at night, rather than those that forage by day, seem most likely to become infected. In addition, the researchers believe the parasitic flies may multiply within a hive, infecting other members of the swarm, even pregnant queen bees.

The research team analyzed several hives in the both the Central Valley and Bay areas of Northern California and also some hives from South Dakota. Seventy-seven percent of the hives they sampled contained evidence of A. borealis. The scientists believe this may be a recent change in the behavior of this particular species of fly. The A. borealis fly has been known in the past to be a parasite of bumblebees and paper wasps but has not previously been known to inject its eggs into honeybees...MORE...LINK
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