An Inordinate Fondness for Beetles

how do you draw insects in chinese painting

@immodest-moose submitted: This is my favorite time of year because i find cecropia moths everywhere! Found in detroit michigan

Family: Choreutidae

First Described: 1889 by Riley

Found in: Florida and Cuba

大艷青尺蛾  -  Agathia magnificentia inoue, family Geometridae

- Tianone (1100m), Ilan County, Taiwan

Bearded palm weevil (Rhinostomus barbirostris), Belize Photos by Nicky Bay on Flickr // Facebook // Website

Vulture bees are Americans stingless bees (Meliponini) within the genus Trigona (they still have nothing on our Aussie bees). There’s only three species of them: Trigona necrophaga, Trigona crassipes, and Trigona hypogea (of which there are two subspecies t.h robustior and t.h hypogea).

T. necrophaga specimen

They’re called as such because of their unique obligate necrophagy, aka. instead of pollen they harvest meat off carcasses. They collect paste-like and liquefied rotting flesh and turn this into proteinaceous food which (in common with other stingless bees) they store in pots within their hives. They also create a sort of “honey”-like substance (sometimes dubbed corpse-honey) which they make by collecting juice from fruit. They were reported to never visit flowers, making meat from carcasses their main food source.As of yet no one has tired this honey because it probably would kill them or at the very least make them sick.

T. hypogea bees feeding on lizard carcass.

They’ll eat most carrion they can find including lizards, mammals, birds and so on and, like maggots, tend of enter larger carcasses through the eyes. T. hypogea are different from the other vulture bees in that they have five pointed teeth on the end of each mandible. which seems to have led to unique behavioural adaptions such as aggressive foraging beaviour, in that this species will often rob / attack competitors for access to food and nest sites.

What makes these stingless bees unique isn’t just the fact they harvest and live on meat (as there are many bee species that do so also), but rather that they only live on meat and no longer harvest flowers at all. This makes them quite unusual in terms of other  stingless bees (Meliponini).

AND THEN WE DRAG AND SORT

FERMENTATION

AND SEEDING

CAN’T EAT A FUNGUS IF I’M NOT FUNGUS BREEDING

Today’s anime insect of the day is: A dragonfly from Naruto