Beekeepers use tobacco smoke to calm the bees, she obviously wasn’t smoking nearly enough cigarettes at once.

heh, I initially read that as “Dr. Peter Valdespino and is played by Alien Grey“

No, they had smallpox before, but then they got enough bee experience to level up and unlock the alien virus upgrade.

Bees who are just starting out only get to spread irritable bowl syndrome.

In ‘War of the Coprophages’, the entomologist is Dr. Bambi Berenbaum, but I think you might have been thinking of the roboticist who makes insect-like robots. The Internet informs me that that character was named Dr. Alexander Ivanov and was played by Ken Kramer. The guy in Zero Sum episode is named Dr. Peter Valdespino and is played by Allan Gray, so it’s two different people.

I was going to say that it would have been nice to have a little cameo for Dr. Bambi in this episode, but then I realized that that was tantamount to wishing that she would get stung to death by bees, so never mind.

Oh, and I forgot to say I was always annoyed that the smallpox bees in this episode turned into alien virus bees later on. Were they the same bees and just retconned or what?

You forgot MIIIIIIIITES!

I think that probably just lots of people think insects are creepy, so it’s kind of a go-to thing for a horror-tinged TV series. Sort of like how the new Dr Who keeps going back to the ‘little kids are creepy’ well.

That aside, this comic made much more sense than the episode did (I thought). Probably thanks to handy cross-referencing. I forgot that Marita and Skinner basically teamed up, but now I have to rewatch it to jog my memory…

That’s a nice ID photo Skinner’s got. Heh.

Also: Is it just me, or are there a lot of weird bug episodes? Weird cockroaches. Weird bees. Different weird bees. Just watched one about weird tobacco beetles the other day. Bugs, fungus and unusual bodily substance vampires.