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When bees get a taste for dead things: Meat-eating 'vulture bees' sport acidic guts:
A little-known species of tropical bee has evolved an extra tooth for biting flesh and a gut that more closely resembles that of vultures rather than other bees.
Typically, bees don't eat meat. However, a species of stingless bee in the tropics has evolved the ability to do so, presumably due to intense competition for nectar.
"These are the only bees in the world that have evolved to use food sources not produced by plants, which is a pretty remarkable change in dietary habits," said UC Riverside entomologist Doug Yanega.
Honeybees, bumblebees, and stingless bees have guts that are colonized by the same five core microbes. "Unlike humans, whose guts change with every meal, most bee species have retained these same bacteria over roughly 80 million years of evolution," said Jessica Maccaro, a UCR entomology doctoral student.
Given their radical change in food choice, a team of UCR scientists wondered whether the vulture bees' gut bacteria differed from those of a typical vegetarian bee. They differed quite dramatically, according to a study the team published today in the American Society of Microbiologists' journal mBio.
Journal Reference:
Laura L. Figueroa, Jessica J. Maccaro, Erin Krichilsky, et al. Why Did the Bee Eat the Chicken? Symbiont Gain, Loss, and Retention in the Vulture Bee Microbiome, mBio [open] (DOI: 10.1128/mBio.02317-21)
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday November 25 2021, @03:10PM (1 child)
They store both rotting meat and honey in their hive at the same time. There must be some interesting and complex hive management and biological processes (since honey is normally regurgitated nectar) going on to create (since they apparently aren't eating nectar so much any more?) and keep their honey from being contaminated by bacteria from the meat since the latter has a vast number of rando species in it (there must be something that can live in honey too, if it can get the chance).
(Score: 2) by looorg on Thursday November 25 2021, @03:51PM
So they are basically controlling the rot, which might make it a sort of fermentation. Mix in some honey. Are they making meat mead? Drunken little buzzers.