The Zombees are Coming!

[XLFD]

Zombie Apocalypse Working Its Way Up the Food Chain?

"I joke with my kids that the zombie apocalypse is starting at my house," said Mark Hohn, a novice beekeeper who spotted the infect

Hohn returned from vacation a few weeks ago to find many of his bees either dead or flying in jerky patterns and then flopping on the floor.

He remembered hearing about zombie bees, so he collected several of the corpses and popped them into a plastic bag. About a week later, the Kent man had evidence his bees were infected: the pupae of parasitic flies.

"Curiosity got the better of me," Hohn said.

The zombie bees were the first to be confirmed in Washington state, The Seattle Times reported.

San Francisco State University biologist John Hafernik first discovered zombie bees in California in 2008.

Hafernik now uses a website to recruit citizen scientists like Hohn to track the infection across the country. Observers also have found zombie bees in Oregon and South Dakota.

The infection is another threat to bees that are needed to pollinate crops. Hives have been failing in recent years due to a mysterious ailment called colony collapse disorder, in which all the adult honey bees in a colony suddenly die.

The life cycle of the fly that infects zombie bees is reminiscent of the movie "Alien," the newspaper reported. A small adult female lands on the back of a honeybee and injects eggs into the bee's abdomen. The eggs hatch into maggots.

"They basically eat the insides out of the bee," Hafernik said.

After consuming their host, the maggots pupate, forming a hard outer shell that looks like a fat, brown grain of rice. That's what Hohn found in the plastic bag with the dead bees. Adult flies emerge in three to four weeks.

There's no evidence yet that the parasitic fly is a major player in the bees' decline, but it does seem the pest is targeting new hosts, said Steve Sheppard, chairman of the entomology department at Washington State University.

"It may occur a lot more widely than we think," he said.

That's what Hafernik hopes to find out with his website, zombeewatch.org. The site offers simple instructions for collecting suspect bees, watching for signs of parasites and reporting the results.

Once more people start looking, the number of sightings will probably climb, Hohn said.

http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2012/0924/Zombees-First-zombie-bee...

The process is gruesome, here is a short video showing the process wherein the host goes from 'to bee' to 'not to bee':

Little is known yet as to what would happen to a human being or some other animal who is stung by such an infected bee, but at least it looks like it would happen out west first.  But there are more zombies in the lesser orders of the animal kingdom, such as the arachnids. 

It seems there exists a mysterious type of wasp, as yet unnamed, that instead of falling into the spiders web, attacks and stings the web-builder.  The wasp lays eggs on the spiders abdomen while it is paralyzed by the sting.  Eventually, the eggs develop and actually start to eventually control the host spider, making the spider, in his last days as host, build a protective structure for the developing wasps!  Here's a full report courtesy of http://www.damninteresting.com/mind-controlling-wasps-and-zombie-sp...

Welcome to October on the Ludington Torch, where we will inject you with common sense, facts, analysis, and wisdom dispensed by everyday local citizens and others to remove the zombie forces eating away inside of you.

[Willy]

I have my own opinion on the problem of "colony collapse disorder." All of the bees used by beekeepers are a domesticated genetic strain and have been commercially bred to supply beekeepers with a fresh supply of bees when new hives are put into service or when a colony dies out from any number of reasons. Every year a healthy hive of these domestic bees will have some excess queens and one of these queens will fly off and take half of the hive with her. This is called a "swarm". The bees that leave the hive find another suitable place to live which sometimes includes cavities in buildings. In my opinion there are very few, if any, wild bees left because they have been replaced by these domestic bees and the genetic makeup of these domestic bees makes them more vulnerable  to diseases and other maladies that prey on bee populations. Humans have basically replaced natures natural pollinators with their own and are now reaping the outcome of that interference.

[XLFD]

The implications of this new research could be astounding, considering the tinkering biochemists are doing with the plant and animal kingdoms to make bountiful yields and frankenfoods, and can explain something of what's happening among bees.  They may be succumbing to viruses normally associated with plants:

Another explanation for Colony Collapse Disorder and the rapid decline of honeybees follows a surprising discovery involving a virus that typically infects the Plant Kingdom - Tobacco Ringspot Virus (TRSV).

U.S. and Chinese researchers report their findings in mBio, the online open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology.

The plant virus has somehow jumped to the Animal Kingdom, now infecting honeybees.

ABSTRACT:  Emerging and reemerging diseases that result from pathogen host shifts are a threat to the health of humans and their domesticates. RNA viruses have extremely high mutation rates and thus represent a significant source of these infectious diseases. In the present study, we showed that a plant-pathogenic RNA virus, tobacco ringspot virus (TRSV), could replicate and produce virions in honeybees, Apis mellifera, resulting in infections that were found throughout the entire body. Additionally, we showed that TRSV-infected individuals were continually present in some monitored colonies... This study represents a unique example of viruses with host ranges spanning both the plant and animal kingdoms.

Pathogen host shifts represent a major source of new infectious diseases. Here we provide evidence that a pollen-borne plant virus, tobacco ringspot virus (TRSV), also replicates in honeybees and that the virus systemically invades and replicates in different body parts.

[Willy]

Good find X. Another practice beekeepers perform may answer why the bees are becoming infected. Every spring and fall beekeepers feed antibiotics to each colony and I believe there has been cross contamination of the plant virus to the bees because of viruses that may have mutated from coming into contact so often with the the antibiotics given to bees twice a year. The reason for giving the antibiotics to the bees was for preventative measures to eliminate the possibility of the colonies contracting diseases. As we have all heard, the overuse of antibiotics has caused problems by conditioning diseases to develop into resistant strains.