The Bee Louse

Braulidae, or the bee louse, is actually a small fly (about 1.5mm long). They have the superficial appearance of lice, no doubt an adaptation for living upon bees, grasping the hairs of the head and thorax.

Bees have a lot of enemies. Predators, disturbers, commensals, and parasites. For some reason, the bee louse is considered a commensal rather than a parasite, despite the fact that the little fuckers steal food from the mouths of bees. They are considered 'guests' within a hive, but I would call them kleptoparasites. 

They prefer living on the queen as the queen gets all the best stuff like honey and royal jelly fom the nurse bees.

(Interestingly, a brief exposure to tobacco smoke narcotizes the bee louse, and it can be collected on sticky wax paper placed under the hive and disposed of, a practice going back to 1740).

There is speculation that it uses chemical camouflage, not unlike varroa mites. So, and there hangs the tale. Is it a form of mimicry, pretending to be a bee? Is it a form of invisibility, so that the bee ignores the parasite? Or is it a behavioral pheromone, meaning the bees notice but are not alarmed or don't care? I'm betting the last as typically the social pheromones in honeybee colonies are long lasting hydrocarbons easy to produce. 

And is there an analog to the bee louse in our monkey hives? What if there are invisible weird little fuckers living with us? I had a weird feeling about that. I thought of brownies, elves, fairies, but all of them have good connotations in folklore of helping people, right? Before I went and started marking the level of my milk bottles and counting how many beers were left, could there be some other form of kleptoparasite that was not magically invisible? Something that was not necessarily a different species from us? Something, or someone, we notice and shrug off?

Because it seems to me that humanity is riddled with kleptoparasites.

Any ideas, aside from the usual suspects at the top of the monkey hive? Typicaly prejudice is tilted towards the poor, like gypsies and hoboes stealing cooling pies from window sills..Or snatching small children and replacing them with straw dolls. But what if it's all the banksters and white collar criminals that the equivalent of the bee louse? Clearly a brief exposure to tobacco smoke and sticky wax paper is an inadequate response.