This week I have seen 3 western honey bees hanging around my porchlight. Which isn’t in itself that strange. Bees are attracted to light. But tonight I watched one intentionally fly into it, clearly get burned, take a break and then keep doing it until it died. I didn’t want to interfere with it, in case it had something wrong with it that might cause it to be aggressive towards me. I’ve had this bright light for years and only recently seen honey bees hanging around it.
I read that there are parasites that can cause a been to behave strangely.
I just want to know if anyone else has seen this or if anyone knows what it means.
I don’t know what this behavior means, but I think one has to define terms when ascribing intention to an intelligence very different than our own. What do you mean when you say she “deliberately” flew into your light?
I’m pretty sure these are “zombees” - they are parasitized by a certain fly larva and it causes them to fly at night and be attracted to lights. https://www.zombeewatch.org/
at night any bright light will attract bees and other things like moths because it acts like the sun to them. if it is happening at night, this will disrupt their day and night schedule.
Bees aren’t naturally active at night, to my knowledge, which is why seeing a honey bee active at night (and it will usually be attracted to light, like may other insects) is a symptom of being parasitized by this fly.
Coincidentally, yesterday a large bumblebee (Bombus sp.) got into my basement and began throwing itself at a bare bulb. I turned off the lamp to deter it- it was alive but apparently stunned. I wonder if that was a related behavior. This was during the daytime, but the basement is pretty dim.
Interestingly enough many moths don’t come to light and some wasps are very common at lights. As far as my understanding goes, the jury is still out on the reason many moths come to light though there are some different theories. We still don’t know enough about a lot of the life of insects so we all might have the opportunity to discover something.
I’ve had the privilege of mothing with Dr. Jerry Powell from Berkeley a few times, and he’s basically studied moths for decades. His answer to why moths come to lights: “They just do.”
My husband and I have seen the same thing a few times over the last few weeks.
@tiwane Thank you so much for posting the explanation and the links to the zombeewatch page. It explains so much and I can’t wait to catch a few to see if anything hatches.
You’re welcome! I was lucky enough to go on an insect walk with Dr. Hafernik in San Francisco years ago, who I believe was one of the founders the Zombee Watch project, so I heard about it then.
