Nature
PUBLISHED
When you think of a bee drifting lazily through your garden, the words that come to mind might be more related to flowers and yellow stripes than they are to the smell of rotting meat. But for the vulture bees from the Trigona genus, that’s exactly what they’re after.
The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.Trigona contains around 32 species of stingless bees, three of which, found in Costa Rica, are specially adapted to feed on decomposing matter, mainly rotting flesh.
They eschew blossoms entirely but will slurp up sugar from nodules on the stems of some plants. All three species have an incredible sense of smell, and they can sniff out their dinner from a long way off.
But eating rotting flesh comes with some downsides (would you believe it), mostly in the form of bacteria and toxins. The bees have developed a tactic to deal with this.
A paper published in 2021 explored the inner workings of vulture bees and found that their microbiome differed compared with their plant-loving cousins; they even have acid-loving bacteria in their stomach that work to break down the meat inside.
These microbes have also been found in the stomachs of actual vultures, showing the association between diet across very different species.
“The vulture bee microbiome is enriched in acid-loving bacteria, which are novel bacteria that their relatives don’t have,” said study author Quinn McFredrick, an entomologist at the University of California, Riverside, in a statement in 2021. “These bacteria are similar to ones found in actual vultures, as well as hyenas and other carrion-feeders, presumably to help protect them from pathogens that show up on carrion.”
The bees even have specialized mandibles to slice into meat. Their behavior, on the other hand, is somewhat more like that of a normal bee. They fly their stash back to the hive, store it in special areas, and then feed it to young bees that require high levels of protein to grow. They even repurpose the leg pouches that honeybees use to carry pollen. “They [have] little chicken baskets,” McFredrick said.
Footage of these bees chowing down on rotting flesh can be viewed on National Geographic’s recently released Secrets of the Bees on Disney+.
For more bee antics, check out this interview with Bertie Gregory and find out how Asian honey bees manage to vibrate a murder hornet to death. It doesn’t get more un-bee-lievable than that.
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