Zombees
By Roy Manicke
September 22, 2024
In mid-September, Bruce Longmire, who is my neighbor and a fellow member of Olympia Beekeepers Association, called me to talk about his bees crawling and dying on the pavement in front of his garage. We discussed this mystery at length, and more or less ruled out the usual suspects. One symptom that emerged was that the Dying bees were found in front of the garage, but not near the hives a stone’s throw away. Why the garage?
The garage and surrounding area contained no poisons nor attractive odors. Well, there is night lighting there, and bugs are attracted to light. But honey bees don’t fly at night. Not healthy ones. But then, these were not healthy. They were dying.
Some internet searching pointed to one culprit: Zombie bees.
To verify these were zombie bees (ZomBees?), we decided that Bruce would go out in the evening, collect a dozen or so into a glass jar, then sweep the paving in front of his garage. In the morning, he found more dead and dying bees. They had been flying at night! With some of these in another jar and with the sample from the evening before, he walked over to my place, and we sat down to watch what would happen. The evening batch was the first to give evidence. With the dead bees poured out on a white paper, we could see the emerged and emerging larvae wriggling off to find a spot to pupate.
The pathogen is a tiny fly. It lays an egg on (or in) a bee. The hatchling grows inside its host and emerges as a larva. The process is fatal to the bee, and the larva pupates and hatches to infest another bee.
How are your bees? Do you have Zombie bees? To test your apiary for this pest you can look for dead or crawling bees under a nearby light, if there is one. Or you can make a trap using a battery light and a trapping container, e.g., a large soda bottle. Plans for such a device may be found via Home | ZomBee Watch. You may also find at that site a wealth of information about these pests.
How serious is this pathogen? For alarmists, a good start to finding out is the website of Randy Oliver’s Scientific Beekeeping. Randy keeps track of and researches important beekeeping issues. His first and last article on this topic is available at Zombie bees - Scientific Beekeeping dated 2013.
Enjoy the research. Try not to have nightmares from seeing the pest’s gruesome life cycle.
Roy Manicke
|
