At 04:06 AM 9/10/97 -0300, Stan Sandler wrote:
>Hi Andy and All:  You wrote:
>
>>... One lesson all learn is that bees have nasty
>>habits of eating back on brood if the food intake falls below a certain
>>level, ...
>
>But you also wrote that "bees consume only liquids".
>
>Now I actually did not find that very contradictory, because brood is
>probably more liquidy than pollen.  I can imagine the bees breaking up the
>outer cuticle of the larva and sucking up the juice much as a spider.  (Do
>they haul out the larval shell afterwards?  I can imagine that it might be
>less work than breaking it up into drinkable size pieces.)
 
That is how it works.. they dump the larva and if they eat anymore then the
liquids I have never seen it.
 
>Anyway, Andy, I was pretty intrigued by the idea of bees DRINKING their
>beebread and it has some practical application in how firm one mixes his/her
>pollen substitute/extender.  So I went to the anatomy section of Hive and
>Honeybee today and went over mouthparts and feeding.  It never actually says
>that bees ONLY use their proboscis for feeding.  It is in fact anatomicly
>possible for the bees to put something in their mouth without it going
>through the proboscis (using the mandibles).
 
Yep, they chew up many things including wood. If they could chunk off food
to eat someone would have seen it by now at least in the contents of the gut.
The size of the solid food found in the bees gut is measured in microns so
what ever they take can flow in with ease as a liquid.
 
>On the other hand, the proboscis is a perfect "sludge" pump for pumping very
>thick viscous stuff.  It has a hairy tongue pumping up and down inside it to
>keep stuff moving and unclogged, and if it does clog, it disassembles very
>easily <big grin>.
>
>So, I am not really doubting you Andy, but I am wondering  how sure you are
>that bees ONLY drink.  You might even pull our legs sometimes <bigger grin>.
 
I sure am not the last word on this or anything else and I have had bees
land on my sweaty hands and try to chunk off a hunk of salty skin. Now
since they never got the job done I an not be sure if they would have
swallowed it or not, but it does make one wonder if bees could not change
in time to become real meat eaters.<G> BTW, it hurts, but the pain does not
last long.
 
ttul, Andy-