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The suicide bees — 15 Comments

  1. OK, that’s just weird. But then again, I’ve put out a bowl of beer in my garden to kill slugs.

  2. Slugs like beer. They just can’t help falling in and drowning.

    It’s a happy death you’re providing, Lizzy.

  3. Neo- you have solved the great honey bee die-off! They are being undone by turkey soup.

    Seriously, though, there is probably some chemical in the soup that attracts them as do flowers.

  4. Looks like your soup had some type of chemical that said- Come Heather Honey 🙂

    Detzel and Wink (1993) published an extensive review of 63 types of plant allelochemicals (alkaloids, terpenes, glycosides, etc.) and their effects on bees when consumed. It was found that 39 chemical compounds repelled bees (primarily alkaloids, coumarins, and saponins) and three terpene compounds attracted bees. They report that 17 out of 29 allelochemicals are toxic at some levels (especially alkaloids, saponins, cardiac glycosides and cyanogenic glycosides).[22]

    This is from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bees_and_toxic_chemicals

  5. I don’t know a whole lot about insects, but that won’t stop me from offering some theories in lieu of actual knowledge. 1.) This is the time of year the drones get to mate with a queen, who gets to survive the winter, but they don’t. They know they’re going to die soon and there’s no one left to mate with, so they end it all. 2.) They’re old and tired female worker bees trying to prove they still have it. Or, 3.) they are not bees but yellow jackets, which are wasps and eat other things besides sweet stuff. As do butterflies, who are said to occasionally feast on manure.

  6. What I have found, as a former hobbyist beekeeper, is that the term “bee” is commonly used for any honey bee or similar looking insect.

    I do not know if Neo falls into this category, but if so it would make a lot of sense for carnivorous insects like yellow jackets to be attracted to the soup.

  7. Not too terribly long ago, I had a hornet buzzing around a sandwich of mine, and it ultimately landed in a pool of tabasco sauce… I ended up killing it at that point, so not sure if it would have killed him, but I’d never have thought I’d see a hornet fly into a pool of tabasco. 😮

  8. FRANKLY, everyone here needs to pay more attention to their Kipling:

    “As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
    There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
    That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Chicken returns to her Coop,
    And the drowned bee’s dampened antennae go wabbling back to the Soup;”

  9. I’ve had kamikaze flies in my coffee.

    They have a distinctive flavor, that’s for sure.

  10. Vanderleun for 100 pts. Woulda been 101 pts but for the hazardous quotation marks, not that Kipling would care.

  11. Sounds like yellow jackets to me, unless someone near the restaurant is keeping honey bees.

    Anyway, at this time of year all pollinators, like honey bees and yellow jackets, have just about run out of food sources in the Northeast. Anything that smells good to them is an attractor and, as “dbp” noted above, yellow jackets would be especially drawn to the scent of the meat.

  12. But there the two little corpses floated, the Romeo and Juliet of the apian set.

    This why I come to this site.
    This little sentence has so much strange goodness packed in to it that I have to read more.

    I’ll be tipping the hat soon, Neo, it will be money well spent.

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