![]() A closeup look inside one of these nursery chambers shows the plump white bee larva against the yellow fermenting food its mother stowed away and the plastic lining (piece is pulled aside, right). An Argentinian cellophane bee, Ptiloglossa matutina (a relative of the Arizona one), also makes plastic cribs and fills them with baby food. The bees’ baby food glop is not yeasty beer but, Hammer says, closer to yogurt or sauerkraut. Instead, the fermenters are mostly lactic acid bacteria, Hammer, Buchmann and colleagues reported April 5 in Frontiers in Microbiology. These bees’ microbial fermenters didn’t evolve anywhere in the vast fungal kingdom. arizonensis puts in the plastic vats, he says, “lo and behold, no yeast!” Despite the beery smell of the food that P. ![]() “Quite shocking,” is Buchmann’s summary of what he found. Bees fly aboveground only a few weeks a year, and then for only about two hours around dawn. Collecting the bees, their brood cells, food gatherings and source flowers took several years, mostly of waiting. arizonensis bees as well as relatives in the larger group called cellophane bees. To see what’s in the beer-scented brew, bee microbiome researcher Tobin Hammer of the University of California, Irvine, recruited Buchmann to collect several plastic-making P. Much of it comes from the candelabra-shaped bloom spikes of agave plants, runny enough for easy slurping by bats in southeastern Arizona and Sonora, Mexico. That’s probably because of the unusually watery nectar these polyester bees collect. Open and tilt a nursery of baby Ptiloglossa bees “and all this stuff would run out it’s so watery,” Buchmann says. “Poke it and it dents.” Food stored in a cellophane bee nest, however, is different. Many other bee species mix their baby food of pollen and nectar to “a kind of Play-Doh consistency,” Buchmann says. Each generation of big, fast-flying bees grows up floating in, and feeding on, nothing but mom’s limited-edition brew of nectar and pollen - which smells like beer. arizonensis Buchmann studies in Arizona, females have only a few weeks to fill plastic retreats with all the food each youngster needs for much of a year underground before its own, brief reproductive frenzy in sunlight. It’s “thought to keep the brood chamber area nice and cozy, high-humidity and also to keep out the bad guys.” The plastic layer is transparent, tough and “can be kind of crunchy,” Buchmann says. They use their paintbrush tongues to lick up the gland secretion and slather it on nursery walls. ![]() The stuff makes the finishing touch for little urn-shaped nursery chambers that mother bees dig underground. The microbes add nutrition and a boozy fragrance. Inside each she starts a batch of fermenting pollen from Solanum nightshade flowers (middle), watery nectar from Agave (far left) and bacteria. To keep her youngsters alive long after she’s dead, a solitary female bee ( Ptiloglossa arizonensis) creates underground nursery tunnels (illustrated far right) leading to sealed chambers. ![]()
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