Scientists at the University of California, Riverside suspended fresh pieces of chicken from branches to attract carrion-feeding "vulture bees" in Costa Rica.
Ask a random person to picture a bee, and they'll most likely conjure up the striped creature buzzing from flower to flower collecting pollen to return to the hive. A group of bees can be found slicing chunks of meat from carcasses in tropical rainforests according to a new paper. These bees have different gut microbiomes that are more common to carrion-loving animals. They are known as "vulture bees" or "carrion bees".
According to the authors, most bees are basically "wasps that switched to a vegetarian lifestyle." There are two recorded examples of bumblebees feeding on carrion, dating back to 1758 and 1836, and some species are known to occasionally feed on carrion. vulture bees are considered "obligate necrophages" because they only eat meat.
The first "vulture bee" was identified by Filippo Silvestri in 1901, but nobody called it that since they didn't know at the time that this species fed on carrion. Silvestri dubbed it Trigona hypogea, and he also said that it was used for honey and pollen. The presence of bees' secretions in the nest of honeybees was revealed by biochemical analysis.
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In 1982, David Roubik of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama reported some surprising findings from his observations of the Trigona hypogea colonies. The species took the flesh of dead animals instead of gathering flowers. The bees that stumbled on the rotting flesh deposited a trail of pheromones to call their nest mates, who typically swarmed on the corpse within eight hours.
A worker bee of Trigona hypogea is busily harvesting the corpse of a small lizard. Because it can.
Roubik made a note of how efficient the vulture bees were in entering a carcass. A large lizard was reduced to a skeleton over two days, while the bees took just eight hours to remove all feathers and flesh from the head of a dead passerine. In six hours, they reduced two frog to skeletons. The species had a distinctive hind leg, with a reduced pollen basket, because they fed on carrion.
The bees ate the flesh on-site and then stored it in their crops in order to bring it back to the hive. The bees converted the slurry at the hive into a glandular substance and then stored it in wax pots. He wrote that the metabolism of animal flesh would be unsuitable as stored food. In 1996, a hypothesis was proposed that the actual flesh is what's in the wax pots.
The toothed mandible and hind tibia are from Trigona hypogea.
The three groups of vulture bees that only get their meat from carcasses are called the Trigona hypogea, the Trigona crassipes, and the Trigona necrophages. The bees have five large pointed teeth and have been known to bite. Some people excrete substances with their bites that can cause blisters.
