Photo of a honeybee pollinating a blackberry flower in Golden Gate Park, June of 2011, by Thomas K. Pendergast
KTVU Channel 2 News reported today that a San Francisco State University researcher has come up with an explanation for a stunning decline in Northern California honeybee colonies that sounds more like a plot for a science fiction movie.
According to John Hafernik, a biology professor at San Francisco State University, the die off has been triggered by parasites that inflect and transform honeybees into “zombie-like slaves.”
Hafernik had collected some dead honey bees that were found on campus, but then forgot about them.
“Being an absent-minded professor,” he said in a prepared statement, “I left them in a vial on my desk and forgot about them...The next time I looked at the vial, there were all these fly pupae surrounding the bees.”
Further examination found that the fly pupae were those of the Apocephalus borealis – a parasitic fly.
Go here for the full story on the KTVU Channel 2 news website --->>>
