Attack Of The Flesh Eating Bees*

* Blogger lesson #648 – sensationalize your posts by adding ridiculous titles in order to bait readers into thinking what you have to say is more interesting than it actually is.

***

At lunch I went to my mom’s, as per usual.  Normally I’ll go to my house, eat, then head over there to visit the kids for a few minutes before I have to go back to work.  It’s a tough life, I know.  But today the weather was so nice, warm but not too hot, and so there would be a picnic lunch at her house and I was invited.  In fact, not only was it a picnic lunch, complete with blanket spread out on the lawn, but we roasted wieners over the fire pit on sticks, ate potato salad, popsicles and cheese strings, and the kids ran around with no shoes on.  Not a bad way to spend a lunch hour, is what I’m saying.

While I was sitting, eating the first of two popsicles, I lazily and absent-mindedly stared at a piece of hotdog on a plate.  It was just a lonely piece, rejected when dessert appeared, sitting by itself, minding its own business. 

And then along came a bee.

Bees, I’ve always understood, are attracted to sweet things.  Flowers, melted candy on a sidewalk, a bowl of discarded ice cream, sticky fingers.  That is what is in their nature to collect and bring back to the hive.  That’s what they eat.  Pollen and nectar, right?  And yet this bee, who seemed to me to be like any other bee I’ve seen, flew right up to that chunk of hotdog, land less than gracefully on its broken end and began a very thorough investigation.

I decided not to shoo it away.  It’s a bee, right, so he’ll realize this wiener isn’t a flower soon enough and fly away.  No harm, no foul, no need to scare the wee thing.  But then it started gnawing away at it.  Using his little pinchy things on his mouth and his two front legs, he sawed off a piece about the size of his own head, tucked it under his middle two legs, and flew off.  Again, very ungracefully.  The hotdog chunk seemed to weigh only slightly more than this little bee was used to carrying.

Well, I thought, that was odd.  A meat-eating bee.  Huh. 

And then he came back.  Did the whole thing again.  I had my mom watch as my witness.  A meat-eating bee.

I even Googled it.  “What do bees eat?” is what I asked.  And every page I clicked on confirmed my suspicions – pollen and nectar, pollen and nectar, pollen and nectar.  Not once did I see that bees eat meat or meat-like substances or really food at all.  No hotdogs, no beef or pork byproducts, no tofu dogs.  Pollen and nectar.

So either the end is nigh and otherwise vegan insects have begun feasting on the flesh of mammals or this bee has made a deal with some ants or something.  Maybe the ants have some kind of mob thing going on where they’ll protect the bee hive from whatever predators steal honey in exchange for human food.  Or they’ve adopted an orphan ant as one of their own but the ant requires more than just pollen and nectar to survive and so, being a good adoptive daddy, the bee seeks out alternate food sources, including and not limited to, all beef wieners. 

All’s I know is if the bees are eating meat now, you can count me out of stepping outside ever again.