For the past handful of years, I've been finding dead bees on the ground out
in the middle of the parking lot at my work (in Orange County, California),
near nothing but lightposts. Since this never happened in the past, I
figured it was related to Colony
Collapse Disorder, but I wondered what the nature of the bees' death was
— did they suddenly suffer the equivalent of a massive heart attack and
drop out of the air mid-flight, or what? This evening I found out.
After getting home from work, I noticed a bee on the sidewalk at my apartment complex walking around and around in a counter-clockwise circle a couple of inches wide or so. At first I frowned and thought, "Bee dance??", but it was my understanding that those are supposed to take place in the hive, and the movements here didn't look as complex as the dances I'd seen footage of — there was no "waggling" to speak of. The bee just kept going in circles as I watched for a minute or two, stopping only once to "stretch" and rub its hind legs together. Its walking movements seemed normal other than that, but its path was so clearly nonsensical that I figured I was probably watching the stage that precedes those dead bees laying on the ground out in the open at work.
I went inside to read up on it, and found a good article, Daily Kos: eSci: New Cause of Bee Colony Collapse Disorder Found. Sure enough, scientists reported earlier in 2012 that honey bees transported to California from South Dakota in the past few years have been suffering from parasitization by a phorid fly, Apocephalus borealis, that previously was only known to prey on North American bumblebees and paper wasps. This parasite modulates the bees' behavior, making them do unnatural things like flying at night, seeking out light sources (like those lightposts at work), and finally, walking in a circle until they die, after which the phorid larva(e) exit their unfortunate host.
After reading up, I walked back over to the bee to see if it was still there, and it was. Its walking movements were no longer normal-looking, though. The bee was now clearly having problems controlling its limbs, and there was also a suggestion of equilibrium problems from the off-angle it was holding itself at (you can actually see the odd angle of its head in this slightly out-of-focus iPhone photo). The circle was no longer inches wide — it was now only capable of spinning itself slowly in place. The bee seemed to be in distress, and being forced to shuffle around in a circle like a zombie until your body collapses just struck me as an awful way to go out, so I decided to squash the bee to put it out of its misery (to the extent bees can experience misery, of course).
Ya know, as a vegetarian and animal lover, I am usually live-and-let-live with all of kingdom Animalia, including man-eating predators, but I can't say I have much respect for parasites that are inherently fatal to their hosts (parasites in neutral or mutually beneficial relationships with their hosts, like hookworms curing people of severe allergies, get a free pass). And parasites that partially control the minds of their hosts (and, in many examples, cause the host to engage in suicidal behavior to enable the parasite to move on to the next stage of its life cycle) have particularly terrifying implications for humans, enamored as we are of our free will. There is significant early evidence that organisms such as Toxoplasma gondii (often found in your local cat litter box, and in a surprisingly high percentage of humans) may already be modulating human behavior in very negative ways.
Presumably if we were to eradicate the Apocephalus borealis, it would have less overall negative effect on the ecosystem than if these "evil" little buggers (presumably along with other causes, possibly several) eventually kill off all the bees in North America, <Napolean_Dynamite>our pollinating allies</Napolean_Dynamite>, but likely such a solution isn't even feasible with today's or the next few tomorrows' technology. Will the bees hold out?
Update, 2012-12-12: Apparently parasites can cause similar walking-in-circles behavior in mammals. Parelaphostrongylus tenuis, commonly known as brainworm, normally reproduces by getting ingested along with vegetation by white-tailed deer, then burrowing through the stomach, up the spinal cord, and laying eggs in the deer's brain (yikes!). When brainworms get ingested by other ungulates such as moose and sheep, however, they are fatal to their hosts, and similar symptoms can be seen in moose, for instance, as I saw in the bee: walking in circles, holding the head at a weird angle, displaying other equilibrium problems, etc. I learned that the term for a parasite that is fatal to its host is a parasitoid; this particular bit of nastiness apparently only acts as a parasitoid towards non-deer ungulates, and thankfully cannot infect Homo sapiens.
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Dan Harkless
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