The Curious Beekeeper
Night Flight: A Beekeeper’s Guide to Zombie Flies
Watching a honey bee mulishly smash into a light bulb is disconcerting, surreal, as if the bee is shouting and pleading with the natural world: Hear me! Help me!
I will never forget the bee tinking against the hot glass, desperate to evade the thing savaging her body, chewing her organs, hollowing her to a husk. Another bee was circling the bulb, buzzing in oscillations like a model airplane, a hum that weakened and strengthened with every rotation, providing an unsettling background for the bulb-butting bee.
What were these bees sensing? Fear? Panic? Pain? Were they trying to outrun the things growing inside them? Now that they’d escaped their hive, were they also running from life?
We live in a world where nothing is sacred, where living things eat or get eaten, and honey bees are no exception. In the sinister case of zombees, the enemy is a tiny fly just minding her business, laying her eggs in a safe place. Soon, as we’ve seen in countless low-budget horror films, the injected eggs will hatch into ravenous larvae that eat the bees from the inside out.
A media sensation
I first heard about zombees in a short news piece in 2012, back when the press was front-paging any and all bee catastrophes.1 First described by John Hafernik at San Francisco State University (SFSU) in 2008, afflicted honey bees apparently abandoned their hives and flew into the night, attacking sources of light until they died of exhaustion.2
The name “zombees” suited the media and soon became a household word. Tales of possessed bees fleeing their hives under the cover of darkness and ramming anything that glowed were rampant.
Although the reports seemed too sensational to be real — and I had seen no reported sightings from my area — I decided to go zombee hunting as soon as the earth warmed in spring.
Creatures of the night
So one night, after dark, I and my trusty insect net decided to visit the flag light, a bright beam aimed skyward, visible from a distance.
Much to my profound amazement, I discovered the two bees mentioned above behaving like kamikazes with no regard for their own lives. Other insects, too, gathered around the light. Moths, several beetles, and delicate-winged six-leggers cavorted in the glare. Some insects circled the bulb, some walked directly on the glass, and some hovered nearby, but only one honey bee seemed bent on breaking the glass.
After watching for several minutes, I gathered the two bees in my net and transferred them to a screen-topped Mason jar with a bit of syrup-laden sponge. I could imagine many reasons for those bees being out after dark, dancing in the light, and I was sure it had nothing to do with zombees.
In any case, I had about a dozen colonies back then, so two bees seemed inconsequential. Unconcerned, I left the jar on my potting bench …
