The zombie apocalypse has been much-talked about this year, between all the face-eating stories and the CDC actually preparing people for a zombie apocalypse (under the guise that it would help us if faced with a “real” life-threatening emergency). Now we can add something equally terrifying and somewhat baffling to the growing pile of things that make us not want to live on this planet anymore: zombie bees.
Apparently, a parasitic fly attaches to the honeybees and lays eggs inside them, and when the maggots hatch, they eat the bees from the inside out. I’m assuming they then burst through the bee’s carcass like an Alien and go on to terrorize other living beings.
The sad thing about it is that before the bees die, they start flying around at odd hours of the day and night in jerky patterns as they lose basic functionality, sometimes dropping dead extremely quickly. Seattle beekeeper Mark Hohn said he found several bees flying in those irregular patterns when he returned home from vacation and discovered several bee corpses in and around his house.
“I joke with my kids that the zombie apocalypse is starting at my house,” he said.
The anomaly hasn’t been widely reported elsewhere, but scientists think that’s probably just because no one knows what to look for, or perhaps haven’t witnessed the bees’ bizarre behavior. It’s contributing to an already harsh environment for honeybees, who are also dealing with something called “colony collapse disorder”, which kills off all the adult honeybees in a colony; it’s gotten so bad that crops are being affected.