"Zombie Bees" Found In Washington State, Parasite to Blame
Zombies have arrived in Washington State, but not the brain-eating, walking dead kind.
"Zombie bees" are being reported for the first time in Kent.
The incident was first reported by beekeeper Mark Hohn who went on vacation and came back to his home to find something strange. Many of the bees were dead and others were behaving weirdly, as they were flailing around the floor and flying in erratic patterns.
Hohn took the incident lightly as he reported to The Seattle Times, "I joke with my kids that the zombie apocalypse is starting at my house."
So what's the reason for the odd bee-havior? An infection known as "zombie bees" is to blame.
The infection was first discovered in 2008 by John Hafernik, a biologist at San Francisco State University. He studied bees that flew at night and displayed bizarre movements and later found that a parasite was to blame.
The process of the infection plays out like a horror movie with a parasitic fly that injects its eggs into a bee's abdomen. Hafernik described the next phase of the cycle, saying that the maggots then "basically eat the insides out of the bee."
Once the bee is consumed by the maggots pupate, it forms a shell similar looking to brown rice, which eventually leads to the growth of more infected flies.
Hafernik runs zombeewatch.org, which shows people how to collect samples of infected bees and report the findings. He's using the webpage to track the movements of the infection and to see how big this threat is to the bee population.
Washington is the newest state to have the parasite, as the infected bees have been confirmed so far in California, Oregon and South Dakota.