Bee got your tongue?

The thought of munching on a rotting toad carcass may turn your stomach. But for the stingless vulture bee, the decaying flesh makes for a healthy meal.

Why such an appetite for animal corpses? Like most adult bees, the vulture bee, Trigona hypogea (Tree-GO-na hy-PO-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. "They are necrophages [organisms that eat dead animal carcasses], so they use the animal meat for their protein needs," says Fernando Noll, a biologist at the University of the State of Sao Paulo in Brazil.

This tropical bee's lifestyle can be dirty work. "Like maggots, the bees usually get into a carcass through the eyes. Then they root around in a bunch of mucky flesh," says David Roubik of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama.

The bee stores its meaty collection in a special stomach compartment until it gets back to the nest. There, it transfers the material to another vulture bee. This bee's job: Mix the flesh with digestive fluids to break it down into an edible substance. Then it spits the gooey gunk into pot-like containers until it's time to serve the immature bees. Yum!

If the idea of toad carcass on a platter makes you queasy, it gets worse. Noll just discovered that the bees also have an appetite for live prey (animal hunted by another animal for food). He observed vulture bees devouring young wasps that had been abandoned in their nest!