Freaky Animals

The Frog Pond #5: Vulture Bees

Or, the rotting meat and misinformation of vulture bees

Sarah L. Hawthorn

01 Apr 2023 — 10 min read

We’re a quarter of the way through the year! That can be panic-inducing or relieving depending on your outlook. For me, it means I’m one step closer to home.

A promise of green

The forest floor is a grey-brown mess of snow that has overstayed its welcome. But every day, you search for the tiny signs that life is coming back. Today, finally, early sprouts spring out of the muck. They form a shape; an arrow, pointing towards the pond.

You find the pond bursting with life. Baby ducks are now adventurous toddlers. The reeds tower over the sunrise side of the water. Frogsong welcomes you.

This month’s pond is keeping pace, no matter what that pace is.

Mist-erious knowledge

A soft droning sounds around your left ear. As you turn to investigate, a swarm of mist surrounds you.

What’s the buzz? It’s carnivorous bees

After a tweet about these meat-eating bees went viral (trypophobia warning for the image’s weird honeycombs), I wanted to dive deeper into what exactly these “vulture bees” are. They’re also known as carrion bees, and include 3 subspecies of bees in South America that feed on rotting meat¹.

Instead of making normal honey by collecting pollen and processing nectar, vulture bees process meat as a high-protein secretion similar to royal jelly in normal bees².

In the (dead) eye of the bee-holder

The way that vulture bees collect flesh is through the eye socket of carrion, where they burrow in to tear through flesh with their strong mandibles and extra teeth³ (though scientists studying the bees found they were just as happy to forage from suspended cubes of rotting chicken!). The meat is processed similarly to normal royal jelly through acid in the gut, regurgitation, and storage, then used as food⁴.

Vulture bees do not produce excess food like other types of bees, so what they make is what they need⁵ (so you’re probably not going to see vulture bee products in stores any time soon).

A royal affair, found lacking (in pollen)

So, the bad news: There is no meat honey.

While the vulture bees produce royal jelly, a paste-like substance, the foraged meat is only for royal jelly. The royal jelly is produced by mixing the carrion with specific acidic bacteria in the bee’s gut, which breaks down the protein⁶. Vulture bees lack the adequate pollen stores in their legs that other bees have, so they cannot collect pollen—and therefore cannot produce honey on their own⁷.

Wasps → Honey bees → Whatever the hell these are

The meat-eating nature of the 3 species of vulture bees (called “obligate necrophagy”.) was only discovered in 1982⁸, so it’s a relatively new discovery on the ecological radar. There are actually even more species of bees that occasionally feed off of carrion, but those can carry nectar/produce honey as well and are not considered obligate, aka they don’t HAVE to eat carrion to survive.

Since bees evolved from wasps to specialize in a vegetarian diet⁹, that means vulture bees have actually reverted back to meat-eating, evolutionarily speaking¹⁰. This information comes from examining the gut bacteria of bee species to understand what kinds of acids they use to process different kinds of foods.

A matter of taste

The flavour of the royal meat jelly is described as intense, smokey, salty, or uniquely sweet¹¹. Yet, who is describing that flavour? I can't find anywhere credible that actually states who tried it and how, and a fantastic deep dive blog post into the wikipedia article that I found the day before scheduling this article goes even further than I am into the inaccuracies everywhere (and once again reminds me that I need to learn how to edit Wikipedia). They cite a PhD student/bee neuroethologist from Australia's blog stating that actually no, no one has eaten vulture bee royal jelly, and it would most likely be harmful to humans!

Again: Don’t eat it.

This all leads to a larger issue…

Flight of the bumbling sources

Similar to my last frog pond about subterranean forests, this topic was fraught with dead ends, misinformation, and baffling unsourced statements. The key point of contention this time included a few cited sources that said, from nowhere, that the meat-eating bees had honey in their hives as well as royal jelly but didn’t know how it got there.

My red string of investigation kept ping-ponging between explanations: that the bees also produce honey (they can’t, maybe the source misunderstood that other bees can from the same genera can?), or that they somehow stole honey from another bee species (zero indication of this, how would they even do that), or that the young ate the jelly and the mature bees ate the honey (this kept coming up, but the academic source says nothing about this? I assume because normal honey bees do this).

I think that the royal jelly as a concept was being mixed up with honey by a few sources and then, like a bee regurgitating meat, secondary sources transformed these misunderstandings into outright claims.

Tweetbusters

It all leads back to the viral tweet. With over 1 million views, it gets most of it right. The bees do make a substance out of meat, though the substance isn’t called meat honey. Are honey and royal jelly really that different? Honey by definition is made from nectar from flower pollen, which vulture bees can’t make, but ultimately they’re both compounds formed in the same method, just different ingredients.

Strike 1.

The image of the hive featured in the tweet is from the Trigona Wikipedia page, which lists many species of bee under the genera trigona. But only 3 of the listed bee species there are obligate necrophage vulture bees, the rest may or may not feed on both meat and pollen. So I can’t be sure that the image of the hive is a hive of vulture bees, or of hybrid meat-eating and honey-producing bees. Why care? Because two possibilities are true. Either:

The image accurately depicts “meat honey” in a hive, made by bees that feed on both meat and pollen/nectar, but does not feature vulture bees because the bees that made that hive are trigona genera bees but not the 3 obligate necrophage bee species that only eat meat.

Or
The image depicts a hive made by one of the 3 obligate necrophage bee species, so it does not accurately depict “meat honey” because vulture bees do not produce meat honey, they produce royal jelly.

Strike two.

Does this distinction matter? On the surface, it’s the same: Cool bees eat meat and make a weird substance. But the follow-up tweet shares the flavour of meat honey, and implies you can, and that people have, eaten it—again, we know this not to be true (or at least, there’s no credible source that explains how we know any of this).

Strike three.

A rotting queendom of equality

The more you dig in, the more discrepancies you find, which leads to a wider scope of doubt. And some of the interesting, true facts get buried under the over-simplifications. Royal jelly in other species of bees is only for the young and the queen. But in vulture bees, everyone gets royal jelly. It’s an entire colony eating like royalty, built on the rot of creatures thousands of times their size. That’s cool!

I don’t think any of these sources are trying to misinform anyone. But that’s why it’s important to dig into articles like these with a critical lens, because so many people take sources like Wikipedia for granted.

Especially important when one source is saying a substance is edible and another says it’s not!!

I’ve cited as many credible sources as possible in the footnotes, especially justafatboi’s blog post that goes into greater detail on one of the heavily sourced but inaccurate articles that the Wikipedia page uses. If there’s anything I’ve missed or mixed up (honestly, it’s easy to do when half the stuff I’m reading contradicts itself and I have to re-write this section over and over haha), please let me know so I can correct it!

Bonus: Biblical bees??

There was also an interesting aside on Wikipedia (though long since edited out) about a mention of meat-eating bees in the bible. I found the biblical passage it mentioned (Judges 14:8-9) and it’s based on an obscure mention of bees found making a hive in the carcass of a lion.

I’m no apiculturist, but it seems a lot more likely that normal, endemic bees just happened to make a hive in a rib cage rather than a rare species of South American obligate necrophage bees somehow found their way over to the Middle East. Especially since meat-eating bees don’t live in carrion, they just forage it. The things you find while lurking on the edit pages of Wikipedia!

A word from a passing frog

The big developments this month: I’ve applied for a Canada Council for the Arts grant! I’ll learn about their decision in August. It’s an exciting endeavor that I didn’t realize I was qualified for until recently. I’ve also applied for this year’s #RevPit contest, with results in mid-April. Fingers crossed!

Querying

I’ve sent out 89 queries! Getting closer and closer to my goal of 100 queries! Most of the potential agents left on my list are at “send to one at a time” agencies that I’m currently waiting on already, while others are closed, so I’ve reached the temporary limit for now.

I’m proud of myself for how many queries I’ve sent over the past nearly 6 months (?!?!), though approaching 100 is bittersweet. While I’m excited to reach my goal, I’m also very aware that at some point there will be no more horror-repping agents to submit to. And while I hope I won’t have to query my next book, I also know that multi-book querying is far, far more the norm than connecting with the right agent on the right project at the right time on your first go. I’ve done way better in the trenches than I thought I could (even if that “better” could amount to nothing for now), but I’m trying to keep a level head about the next steps.

Meanwhile, the rejection count is up to 51! Of the 14 I received this month (including a few CNRs), 2 were full request rejections. Not fun! But I’ve got other irons in the fire, so all I can do is compulsively refresh my email and keep my fingers crossed (I am going to run out of fingers to cross soon!).

Drafting

The “terrible twos” of drafting is the 30,000-word mark. (at least for me.)

I hit a block shortly after crossing that 30k milestone in early March. There’s something about the final stretch of the first act that slows me to a crawl. It’s a confidence problem. Everyone has their strengths and weaknesses, and for me, I reached a type of scene I didn’t feel I was good at writing (And yet I keep writing this kind of scene in my books because I like reading those scenes!). So, I became reactive. I belaboured every little detail of the chapter so that it’ll be “enough”. Enough to who? Unclear.

Once I got all that out of my system (deepest thanks to the patience of my SO and to ice cream), I *magically* could write like normal again. And I passed 40k!

It’s a good reminder not to catastrophize every bump in the road, and to reflect on my patterns in craft and productivity when things aren’t going right. The answer, and this may surprise you, is not always “you have forgotten how to write and will never succeed again”!

April is Camp NaNo, a set-your-own-goal month-long event. I’ll be attempting to write 20k, about 5-7k more than my monthly average!

Reading

This month’s reading included:

WILDBLOOD by Lauren Blackwood: I was so excited for this one! A Jamaican-inspired fantasy romance about a young woman with a blood connection to a jungle and its deity, who must act as a guide for rich tourists until she meets someone who sees her for more than just her skills. I thought the book dealt really well with some heavy types of trauma and had an interesting, empathetic magic system in the wildblood magic!

BAD CREE by Jessica Johns: A great horror novel about family, grief, trauma, and how they all fit together (and what happens when they don’t fit). I loved the prose, the voice, and the imagery used throughout the book that gave everything an unsettled, dreamy, yet familiar feeling. The metaphors (and not-so-metaphors) about the Alberta oil sands, colonial greed, and the lack of action on missing and murdered indigenous women in Canada were woven so well into the narrative while keeping a sharp voice and focus on family dynamics. Highly recommend this one!

I nearly finished SEA OF TRANQUILITY, a really cool sci-fi novel by Emily St. John Mandel, but alas I did not, and the library wait is another 25 weeks, oof.

Next month, I’m hoping to read FORAGER by Michelle Dowd, a non-fiction memoir about surviving a cult (already nearly 50% through and enjoying it!), I’M THE GIRL by Courtney Summers, a YA thriller (loved Sadie and The Project by her!), and whatever else shows up on my loan shelf!

Living

I mentioned in the intro about being closer to coming home. In late Summer/early Fall, I plan to move back to my hometown of Halifax, Nova Scotia. By then I’ll have been away for 6 years, living in Ontario. This is very happy news! My spouse has accepted an academic job back home, so we’re very excited to start the next stage of our lives within arm’s reach of most of our family and friends! I also miss the ocean, the familiar coffee shops, the libraries, the foggy waterfront morning walks, the desert bars, and the many (many) other parts of the Maritimes that I’ve come to appreciate now that I’ve been away.

It’s still a long way off, but the change in season has me so excited!

A prompt on the lilypad

The mist moves on, lazily drifting through the air, and you wonder if it was feeding you with knowledge, or if you were feeding it.

A particularly verdant patch of meadow beside you—was it there before?—holds a lilypad atop its flower bulbs, and on it, a note:

Who controls information in your stories?

How do you digest media, and what do you turn their lessons into?

How do your characters change, regress, or evolve over time?

The sun falls beneath the treeline—later than it used to, thank goodness. The ducklings quack a farewell as you head back home before dark. There are responsibilities and joys to get on with. Breads to bake, winter clothes to put away, words to write. The world keeps moving, even if the frog pond stays quiet, strange, and weirdly wonderful.

But maybe you’ll turn left again, the next time you go walking.