vulture bee

English

Noun

vulture bee (plural vulture bees)

  1. Any of various bee species in the genus Trigona that feed on carrion.
    • 1996 July 16, Lynne Elber, “Rerun relief”, in Sun Sentinel, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, page 3.E:
      National Geographic Explorer: Ten Incredible Years, 7 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 25, TBS. Highlights of a decade's worth of Explorer programs that featured, just for starters, the first peek at the Titanic since its 1912 sinking, the world's biggest sumo wrestler and the flesh-eating vulture bee of Panama.
    • 2004 September 6, Jeanna Bryner, “Bee got your tongue?”, in Science World, volume 61, page 21:
      Like most adult bees, the vulture bee, Trigona hypogea (Tree-GO-na hyPO-jee-A), collects food to bring back to the nest so it can feed its young. But rather than slurp up pollen and nectar from flowers as most bees do, vulture bees gather meat.
    • 2005 June 17, “Interview: Keith Delaplane and Stephen Buchmann discuss the health of bee populations around the world”, in Science Friday: Talk of the Nation, spoken by Stephen Buchman:
      It is a flesh-eating bee. Actually, we joke – we call it the vulture bee. And it does have cusps on its mandibles, it has no little tool kit, no curriculum or pollen basket to carry pollen back to the nest. It has no need for that.
    • 2021, Laura Figueroa, Jessica Maccaro, Erin Krichilsky, Douglas Yanega, Quinn McFrederick, “Why Did the Bee Eat the Chicken? Symbiont Gain, Loss, and Retention in the Vulture Bee Microbiome”, in mBio, volume 21, number 6, →DOI, page 2:
      To build an understanding of whether the extreme diet shift of vulture bees led to symbiont replacement or whether the core gut microbiome adapted to this new diet, we here compare the gut microbiomes of pollinivorous, facultatively necrophagous, and obligately necrophagous stingless bees.

Further reading
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