For less than a decade, the bee population in the US suffered a drastic decline and many believe that technology is to blame. Researchers in San Francisco accidentally stumbled upon what may be a definite cause.

It was a professor of biology at the San Francisco State University, John Hafernik who made the discovery after he collected some bees so that he could feed them to a praying mantis. After he collected them, he left them in a vial and he forgot about them. The next time he looked at the vial, he saw a lot of fly pupae near the bees.

The parasites were identified as Apocephalus Borealis. It’s a phorid fly native to North America and the assail bees by injecting their eggs into their abdomen. When the eggs hatch, the parasites kill the bees in less than two weeks and they come out of the body. It’s not this part that struck the scientists as a surprise, but the way the bees behaved during the time they got infected.

The parasite kind of turned the bees into zombies by causing them to display bizarre behavior before dying. They exhibit erratic limb movement and weakness throughout the body. These bees then leave the hive and gather around bright lights (like moths do). What remains unclear is whether the infected bees leave the hive by their own will or are forced out by healthy members of the swarm however scientists are trying to figure it out.

The parasites were discovered in 77 percent of the collected samples in the San Francisco Bay Area which makes the zombie problem very grave. Therefore scientists suggest that this might be one of the causes of the collapse in bee populations in the US. Mobile phones have been considered to be at fault, also pesticides, but scientists believe that more than one factor must be involved.

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