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“Vulture bees” evolved a taste for flesh—and their microbiomes reflect that - Ars Technica
Nov 23, 2021 1 min, 15 secs

Ask a random person to picture a bee, and they'll likely conjure up the familiar black-and-yellow striped creature buzzing from flower to flower collecting pollen to bring back to the hive.

So they are commonly known as "vulture bees" (or "carrion bees").

According to the authors—entomologists who hail from the University of California, Riverside (UCR), the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Columbia University, and the American Museum of Natural History—most bees are essentially "wasps that switched to a vegetarian lifestyle." But there are two recorded examples of bumblebees feeding on carrion dating back to 1758 and 1837, and some species are known to occasionally feed on carrion in addition to foraging for nectar and pollen.

An entomologist named Filippo Silvestri identified the first "vulture bee" in 1902 while analyzing a group of pinned specimens, although nobody called it that since they didn't know at the time that this species fed on carrion.

The vulture bees often entered a carcass via the eyes, similar to maggots, and Roubik made particular note of just how efficiently they could consume a carcass.

Because they fed on carrion rather than collecting pollen, this species had a distinctive hind leg, with a drastically reduced pollen basket compared to "vegetarian" bees.

The bees consumed the flesh on-site, storing a kind of "meat slurry" in their crops to bring back to the hive.

We now know of three distinct groups of vulture bees that exclusively get their protein from carcasses: the aforementioned Trigona hypogea, Trigona crassipes, and Trigona necrophages.

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