Meaning of vulture bee | Babel Free

Definitions

Any of various bee species in the genus Trigona that feed on carrion.

Examples

“National Geographic Explorer: Ten Incredible Years, 7 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 25, TBS. Highlights of a decade's worth of Explorer programs that featured, just for starters, the first peek at the Titanic since its 1912 sinking, the world's biggest sumo wrestler and the flesh-eating vulture bee of Panama.”

“Like most adult bees, the vulture bee, Trigona hypogea (Tree-GO-na hyPO-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.”

“It is a flesh-eating bee. Actually, we joke – we call it the vulture bee. And it does have cusps on its mandibles, it has no little tool kit, no curriculum or pollen basket to carry pollen back to the nest. It has no need for that.”

“To build an understanding of whether the extreme diet shift of vulture bees led to symbiont replacement or whether the core gut microbiome adapted to this new diet, we here compare the gut microbiomes of pollinivorous, facultatively necrophagous, and obligately necrophagous stingless bees.”

CEFR level