Special germs in their guts help the bees digest flesh.
Bees are essentially vegetarian wasps. Around a hundred million years ago, we know, the common ancestor of all modern bees was a hunter. But over the last 80 million years, bees have become vegetarians. Most get everything they need from flowers: They sip nectar to make honey, lick up floral oils, and pack protein-rich pollen into built-in pouches on their legs.
But there are exceptions to every rule. Vulture bees, a trio of stingless species in Costa Rica, never touch buds or blossoms. Instead, they get sugar from fruit and “Vulture bees still need protein, though, and they get it from somewhere else entirely: rotting meat. But putrid flesh poses a few challenges not found in poppies or marigolds. Corpses are full of microbes locked in a territorial battle for the remains.
They even repurpose the leg pouches that honeybees use to carry pollen. “They [have] little chicken baskets,” study author Quinn McFredrick, an entomologist at the University of California, Riverside, said inThe researchers also had some surprise meat lovers turn up at their experimental chicken traps. Three other species of bee, all previously thought to be vegetarian, turned out to be interested in meat when it was on offer.
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