Zombie Bees Are Real, and They're Stalking North America

A few years ago, John Hafernik detected in the walls of his house a thrumming hive of honeybees. He didn’t place a frantic call to the exterminator—he’s a bug-loving biologist at San Francisco State University—but grabbed some traps to experiment.

What he found was astonishing. Each dawn, his traps, which were equipped with lights, were filled with as many as 80 bees. That shouldn’t happen, because bees rarely go out at night; they use UV rays and polarized light to navigate and are “blind” without the sun. Even weirder, they swarmed the traps on January mornings when the weather was frosty. Cold kills bees. These were conditions in which no normal bee would be flying around.