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Flesh-Eating Bees Renounced Pollen for Rotting Meat - Gizmodo
Nov 23, 2021 34 secs
These vulture bees, as they’re known, feature unique gut microbes that help them digest meat.

A team of entomologists, seeking to learn more about these pollen-eschewing bees, recently set up chicken baits in a Costa Rican forest.

They ended up collecting a bunch of vulture bees (Trigona necrophaga) and analyzed their guts and genetics in detail.

While ordinary bees have pockets on their back legs to store pollen as they flit from flower to flower, the vulture bees have repurposed the stores as “little chicken baskets,” according to study co-author Quinn McFrederick, also an entomologist at UC Riverside.

The team thinks that the bees probably began eating meat due to competition for nectar.

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