Zombie bee with phorid fly larvae

A really dead zombie honey bee after phorid fly larvae emerge

As if there were not enough pests that kills bees already,  we can now add parasitic phorid fly to our list of worries.  This fly, recently reported in PLoS, lays its eggs in the honey bee and this turns the honey bee into a zombie.  Rather, the infected honey bee exhibits zombie-like behavior. According to a fascinating, new website, ZombeeWatch.org, “Honey bees infected by the Zombie Fly leave their hives at night and are attracted to nearby lights where they become stranded and eventually die.” Kinda like zombies.

Dr. John Hafernik is a Professor of Biology at San Francisco State University and is a leading authority on phorid flys. I guess somebody has to be.  Dr. Hafernik wants to know the extent of this zombie bee problem. Randy Oliver commented on the PLoS article that phorid flys have been in the US long before we saw a honey bee decline. But what if pesticides, loss of  forage, viruses, narrow genetics, yada yada yada…have weakened the honey bee to a point where zombees become a significant threat to the survival of honey bees?  So it is a valid question. To answer that question, Dr. Hafernik has turned to the Internet.

ZombeeWatch.org is not only an informative website but it is a great example of crowd-sourcing and citizen science on the Internet. The website uses illustrations and videos to instruct visitors how to recognise zombie behavior in honey bees, how to construct light traps, how to recognise the emergence of phorid fly larvae (or not), and finally, how to report the results back to Dr. Hafernik.

ZombeeWatch is hardly the first example of Internet-based crowd-sourced data collection and citizen science. Wayne Esaias of NASA near Beltsville, Maryland created HoneyBeeNet and is, as far as I am aware,  the first bee-related citizen science website. According to the website, “Honey Bee Net is a network of beekeepers who monitor and report the weight of their hives as a way to track the timing of the honeybee nectar flow.”

Reminder: the bold purple words in this post are live links to external web pages. I put them there so you can explore each one in greater detail. They will open up in the different page from this one. If your cursor simply dwells over the link, a pop-up text message will tell you where it takes you.

There are hundreds of citizen science/crowd sourcing websites. I have compiled a short list of sites that deal specifically with bees and insect pollinators. If I missed one, please post a comment and let us know (another example of Internet crowd sourcing):

  • Bee Hunt – A “scientific study to understand the impact of climate change and other factors on plant-pollinator interactions, their geographic distributions, and seasonal abundances.”
  • Native Buzz – “Native Buzz is a citizen science project created by the University of Florida (UF) Honey Bee Research and Extension Lab. Our goal is to learn more about the nesting preferences, diversity and distribution of our native solitary bees and wasps, share the information gained and provide a forum for those interested in participating in the science and art of native beekeeping.”
  • Osmia Phenology Project – “The Osmia Phenology Project (OPP) is a trial project designed to test how a network of individuals of Osmia nestwatchers can contribute information about climate change through watching when bees make their nests. This project is based on past work by Wayne Esaias and his network of honeybee hive watchers( need link ) who evolved the basic protocol.”
  • The Great Sunflower Project – They claim that their Backyard Bee Count is the “world’s largest citizen science project focused on pollinator conservation.”
  • Bee Spotter – “BeeSpotter is a partnership between citizen-scientists and the professional science community designed to educate the public about pollinators by engaging them in a data collection effort of importance to the nation. It is a web-based portal at the University of Illinois for learning about honey bees and bumble bees and for contributing data to a nationwide effort to baseline information on population status of these insects.” This effort is currently limited to the state of Illinois.
  • Bumble Bee Conservation Initiative – “We are very interested in tracking the status of these five bumble bee species and finding out where current populations are situated. If you have seen any of these bees please send us a photo. If you are interested in finding out more, would like to see the historical distribution of these bumble bees, or would like to know how to identify them, please check out each species profile page, and consider downloading our pocket ID guides.”
  • Bees, Wasps, & Ants Recording Society – “BWARS is a subscription based volunteer recording society, operating under the aegis of the UK Biological Records Centre (BRC). The Society is affiliated to the British Entomological and Natural History Society (BENHS).  The Society aims to promote the recording of aculeate Hymenoptera in Great Britain and Ireland, and to foster links with similar societies and interested individuals throughout Europe.” BWARS (I love that abbreviation) has two on-going citizen science projects: Colletes hederae mapping project & Bombus hypnorum mapping project.
  • Plant/Phenology Projects – I include this category here because flowering plants are intimately linked to insect pollinators. No forage, no pollinator. There are many citizen science phenology projects. The two best (IMHO) is National Phenological Network and Project BudBurst.

I was a little surprised at how many bee-related citizen science projects there are. However, I was not impressed with the quality of all of them. I could forgive someone for thinking, “This citizen science is just another name for cheap science“. It is inexpensive but is it effective? Some of it looks like busy work with no clear goals, timelines, or end.

DesertToCity

Certainly crowd sourcing has worked for DARPA. The mission of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency mission is to keep the U.S. military more technologically advanced than that of potential enemies.  DARPA has around 240 personnel (about 140 technical) and manages a $3.2 billion budget.  They are poster boys of Big Science.  In 2004, DARPA published a Grand Challenge to make a vehicle travel driverless across a 150 mile desert track .  The only communication with the vehicle would be a kill switch.  100 teams registered to compete but none completed the challenge and no award was paid out.  In 2005, 195 teams entered the race. Not only did 5 teams complete the entire 55 mile course consisting of more than 100 sharp turns,  3 tunnels, and sharp drop-offs but four of them did it under the 10 hour requirement. The awards paid out to winners totaled $2 million – a relative pittance.  Not only did the lure of a reward (and bragging rights) inspire four successful self-piloting solutions but it also provided 291 examples of what does not work (potentially even more valuable).   This idea has caught on with other branches of the U.S. government –  there is now a government website listing challenges at Challenge.gov.

Let’s not forget that the U.S. Patent Office has been practicing crowd sourcing since well before the Internet.  It still awards inventors with very profitable monopolies (aka patents)  in return for creating useful inventions.

So is cash the answer? To solve any problem, all we need to do is to simply pour cash on it? No. I sincerely believe that the engineers that work on DARPA’s first and subsequent challenges are motivated more by a sense of accomplishment and purpose than cash.  Inventors invent for the same reason that painters paint and dancers dance – they want to.  Perhaps they need to.   But the point I am making is that there still needs to be a reward.  Hackers that write open source software, that publish Creative Commons content websites, that publish in the free-access PLOS  or Wikipedia – these people are not motivated by greed. But everyone likes recognition.

For more on what motivates people, see my earlier blog posting,  What Motivates Hackers and Beekeepers?