BEES AND POLLINATIONS

I talked about Varroa Mites yesterday, and I wanted to point out that solitary bees also have parasites that can be deadly.  Osmia, or Mason bees, occur in all shapes and sizes, but nearly all 300 species are fuzzy, mild-mannered, and adorable.  They’re called mason bees because they create nest chambers out of mud.  Each individual female does all the work herself, unlike social bumble bees and honey bees.

Sadly, just as lots of things like to kill honey bees, there is also an extensive list of predators, parasitoids, and parasites that specialize on just this one type of bee.

Solitary bees pose a unique challenge for a parasite. How are you supposed to build up a population when your host doesn’t live in a group or a herd?  Somehow you have to spread and move between both individuals and generations.

One time when even solitary animals have to hook up is…. when they hook up.  Parasitic mites on bees hop off one host and onto another just like changing taxis. The bees are too otherwise occupied with gettin’ it on to notice.

I posted some footage of varroa mites on honeybees yesterday, but that pales in comparison to the horror I’m about to show you.   Indeed, I hope it will shock you, make you quite itchy, and put you off sex for a while.  (I’m not getting any, so might as well make it a universal condition.)

From the video author:

“These Red Mason Bees are heavily (probably fatally) infested with mites. Mites will often move from the male bee (who picks them up whilst visiting flowers), to the female during copulation. The female will then carry them to her nest where they will feed on the provisions and breed. Mites often will suck the blood of bees, sometimes leading to death. Heavily infested bees are unable to fly.”

The mites are probably Chaetodactylus osmiae, but that’s a guess.

Citation:
Miloje KRUNIĆ, Ljubiša STANISAVLJEVIĆ, Mauro PINZAUTI, & Antonio FELICIOLI (2005). The accompanying fauna of Osmia cornuta and Osmia rufa
and effective measures of protection Bulletin of Insectology, 58 (2), 141-152

Filed under: Bees, Entomology, Insects, Science Tagged: Bees, death, osmia, parasites, sex, solitary bees
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[The second in my guest post gig over at Scientopia]

I spent my first post lamenting confusion over CCD (Colony Collapse Disorder), honey bees, and native bee species. One key problem is that CCD as described by entomologists is not the same as “disappearing bees” as described by media or Hollywood. (Although, to be fair, “vanishing bees” is a pretty cool idea, suggesting that perhaps aliens have decided to abduct bees rather than rednecks in pickup trucks, just to mix things up a little.)

CCD is a syndrome. By definition, a syndrome is a collection of signs and symptoms known to appear together but that have no known cause.  Unfortunately, we can’t use Koch’s postulates to clearly link a causal pathogen to a disease.

The CCD Working Group issued this definition in 2009 for a diagnosis of CCD:

1. “the apparent rapid loss of adult worker bees from affected colonies as evidenced by weak or dead colonies with excess brood populations relative to adult bee populations;
2. the noticeable lack of dead worker bees both within and surrounding the hive; and
3. the delayed invasion of hive pests (e.g., small hive beetles and wax moths) and kleptoparasitism [honey stealing] from neighboring honey bee colonies.”

To diagnose a hive that is in the process of failing:

“In those CCD colonies where some adult bees remained, there were insufficient numbers of bees to cover the brood [brood = baby bees], the remaining worker bees appeared young (i.e., adult bees that are unable to fly), and the queen was present.

Notably, both dead and weak colonies in CCD apiaries were neither being robbed by bees (despite the lack of available forage in the area as evidenced by the lack of nectar in the comb of strong colonies in the area and by conversations with managing beekeepers) nor were they being attacked by secondary pests (despite the presence of ample honey and beebread in the vacated equipment).”

“Bees gone” is not sufficient for a diagnosis of Death by CCD, if you are a CSI Apiarist.  The status of the brood is important. A lot of hive health is assessed by how well the queen and her minions are producing and caring for the young.

Another major complication is that beekeeping is an endeavor with an incredibly high rate of failure.  It boggles my mind that 15% hive loss yearly is NORMAL.  I don’t mean hive losses from CCD–that’s the rate of hive failure before CCD arrived on the scene. It’s just the cost of doing business–a lot of hives don’t make it through the winter.

In the last decade, that loss rate has crept up to 30%, on average, for the US.  This increase in bee deaths has been primarily driven by two bee parasites–Varroa Mites and Tracheal Mites.  Varroa mites are pretty big, compared to a bee. It’s probably like having a tiny vampiric chihuahua stuck to your body.  Here, have a look:

(Also, I just SERIOUSLY creeped myself out imagining vampire chihuahuas.)

Tracheal mites live in the breathing tubes of insects, and as you might expect, severely inhibit the ability of bees to thrive.  And I’m just getting started on things that kill bees independently of CCD.  I can think of at least 20 different fungal infections, viruses, and additional parasites.  Foulbrood. Nosema.  Chronic Paralysis Virus.  I’ll spare you the full list, but a LOT of things like to kill bees.

This is part of what makes teasing out the cause of CCD so difficult. It’s not that there are no smoking guns; there are hundreds of smoking guns, all of which plausibly contribute to the decline of bees.  Here is the short list of contributors to CCD, ordered roughly in order of importance, based on the most recent literature:

• increased losses due to varroa mite;
• diseases such as Israeli Acute Paralysis virus and the gut parasite Nosema;
• pesticide poisoning through exposure to pesticides for in-hive insect or mite control
• habitat loss for foraging; inadequate forage/poor nutrition;
• Exposure to pesticides in the environment (including neonicotinoids)
• poor nutrition and migratory stress brought about by the increased need to move bee colonies long distances to provide pollination services.

Note that the pesticides on this list that are of most concern, and mostcommon in hives, are the ones that we apply to the bees on purpose.  Miticides and fungicides to control parasites and diseases of bees are the ones of most concern for sub-lethal effects on the bees we are trying to protect.

Bees encounter pesticides in their environment as they look for nectar and pollen, and those get all the press.  That story fits a narrative for humans–we fear pesticides in our environment too–and gets privileged over other factors in news coverage.

What pesticides really seem to do is make everything else worse for bees. For example, three different studies this year found that exposure to pesticides increased  Nosema infections.  It’s these synergistic effects that make pesticides of concern, not their ability to kill a bee outright.

One other factor that entomologists know is that a Beepocalypse is actually not new, if you look at the history of beekeeping.

Many of these historic collapses pre-date the introduction of pesticides or other modern bee culture practices that are being blamed for bee losses today.  The extent of some of those historic losses are staggering–up to 90% colony collapse in some cases.

Hopefully, this gives you a sense of just how difficult and tangled the problem of CCD is, and how very far we are from a simple linear cause –> effect relationship for this problem.  It IS hard out there for a bee.  And it’s frustrating that when researchers find a new potential contributor, it’s reported as “the cause” of CCD, even when the scientists involve explicitly say it isn’t a cause.

We aren’t kidding. It is complicated.

Next up: a brand new literature review published this month that tries to untangle the issue of pesticides and bees.

Filed under: Bees, Entomology, Gardening, Science Tagged: CCD, colony collapse disorder
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[I am doing a guest gig at Scientopia this week, and will be re-publishing posts I write for them here as well]

Right now, even people who aren’t bug dorks like me are really interested in bees.  This is a mixed blessing for an entomologist.

The Good:

As the American population becomes more distant from their food production (only 1% of the population works on farms), a bee crisis reminds everyone that a significant part of their diet depends on these little Angels of Agriculture.  We rely on bees to serve as pollen couriers for fruits, vegetables, and animal food crops. The value of pollination services is estimated between 30 and 15 Billion dollars per year in the US.

It’s good to remind people that their food depends on these little animals, and to generate some positive buzz about bees and agriculture. People are interested in planting native plants, and creating habitat for bees and other pollinating insects. Win!

The Bad:

Most Americans, and lots of the media, don’t seem to realize that “The Bees” are actually thousands of different species, with very different habitat needs and life histories.  Honeybees are domesticated animals. Like cows and chickens, they came to America with Europeans as introduced species in the 1600’s. They rapidly displaced native bee species, and habitat loss due to agriculture and urbanization further weakened our native pollinators.

Honeybees live in artificial hives we build for them, and work to pollinate crops that grow in huge monocultures of single plant species. It is the honeybees that are dying from CCD, or Colony Collapse Disorder.  Or, maybe not.  It’s complex.

There are also declines in native solitary bee populations, in wild bumble bees, and in bumble bees that are reared commercially like honeybees.  Confused yet?  The press certainly is. Sometimes they can’t even figure out what insects are actually bees, much less what is killing them.

Because the media is Beedazzled, bee stories are covered heavily.  This results in some not-good science getting a LOT of exposure that it would not otherwise. Papers that would have quietly been published in an obscure periodical, and perhaps used as a “don’t do this” example in Journal Club, are suddenly big news. Press releases about grant funding to study a bee issue are presented with the same weight as  finished research.  Mainstream media seems to need to create a false sense of urgency about the stories. OMG NOT THE BEEZ!!! (obligatory photo of Nicholas Cage inserted here).

A whole bunch of conspiracy theories about bees and what’s killing them have surfaced:
GMO Plants.
Cell phones.
Sun Spots.
Power lines and electromagnetic smog.
Rapture. (No, seriously. The bees are being raptured. Via a psychic they issued a “so long and thanks for all the pollen” statement, and revealed they were going to a higher astral plane.)

Claims of catastrophic consequences (“OMG All humans will die without bees!!1!”) and complex, murky science make space for some pretty wild claims.  A whole mythology of what Einstein might have said about bees has sprung up.   Monsanto bought a bee genomics company and it’s part of theirgrand plan to poison us all.  At this point, the only claim I haven’t seen yet is that very, very small black helicopters are abducting the bees.

 So what the F is up with the bees, anyway?

As you can see, there are a lot of different things going on with honeybee disappearance and loss of native species.  It doesn’t help that the honeybee problem is usually framed as a cause/effect relationship between bee declines and some toxic thing. Our modern news cycle isn’t really built to deal with nuance and complexity.

This “toxic thing” narrative results in some stories being given far more weight than others.  For some reason, a lot of people really want to believe cell phones and GMO crops kill bees, even when there is no evidence for it.  Some of the evidence that does exist is discounted, as is the “expert” status of a lot of entomologists.  The story has been shaped as much by what people already think about “those corporate bastards” than actual bees.

This has been a bit of an existential crisis for me, since while I know from my work in science education that just telling people facts won’t change their minds…I still do it. It’s the default position for an academic.

Commenter: Cell phones are killing bees!
Me: Well, actually, not so much [facts]
Commenter: Well what about this story?
Me: [more facts]
Commenter: You are a tool of the industrio-telecommunications complex.

I occasionally find myself in the problematic position of not wanting entomology to be covered widely as news because people aren’t listening or thinking carefully. (Which, frankly, could cover a lot of the daily news cycle, not just stories about insects.)

This is all a long way of saying that “The Bee Problem” is a really complex issue, involving many species, and the research isn’t finished.  It’s a biological system with thousands of moving and living parts.

When trying to explain this, I find myself returning to Carl Zimmer’s excellent New York Times summary of recent research on bees and pesticides:  Bees’ decline linked to pesticides.  Carl (I shook his hand once, so I can call him Carl, right?) does a great job of showing how the scientific community is still resolving how all this research adds up.  In a post on his blog providing supplimental information to the NYTimes story above, Carl discusses the difficulty of making sense of all this information:

“I found this story to be especially challenging to sum up in a single nut graph. To begin with, these experiments came after many years of previous experiments and surveys, which often provide conflicting pictures of what’s going on…. The experiments themselves were not–could not–be perfect replicas of reality, and so I needed to talk to other scientists about how narrow that margin was. As they should, the scientists probed deep, pointing out flaws and ambiguity–in many cases even as they praised the research.
At the same time, these two papers did not appear in a vacuum. Other scientists have recently published studies (or have papers in review at other journals) that offer clues of their own to other factors that may be at work. And, biology being the godawful mess that it is, it seems that these factors work together, rather than in isolation.”

Exactly! It’s a body of research, not hundreds of isolated individual papers.  If Carl Zimmer–an exceptional science journalist with access to the actual scientists that are doing the research–struggles trying to assemble a coherent picture of the information, I KNOW that the rest of us regular schmoes are too.

What I hope to do in my time at the Guest Blogge is cover some of the research that I think is important to understanding bees and the ecosystem services they provide, within the context of a field of rapidly evolving research.

Filed under: Bees, Entomology, Science
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It is finally starting to reliably warm up in spring, although we still have a few cold evenings. Bumblebees are one of the first pollinators out in the spring, and the fuzzy adorableness of their bodies does help retain heat.

With the help of a thermal camera, David Attenborough shows us some other clever tricks that let these “cold-blooded” insects warm up and fly on cold days.

Enjoy!

Filed under: Bees, Insects, Movies, Science Tagged: attenborough, bumble bees
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Earlier today #insectsongs started trending on twitter. I don’t know how it got started–but it produced some hilarious results! Here are some of my favorites–I’m sure I missed some good ones.

Filed under: Entomology, Insects Tagged: LOL
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My friend David Gracer has some news from the world of insect eating!  From Dave:

The world has become increasingly interested in the subject of edible insects. There’s frequent mainstream media coverage, conferences, and now two important new developments. World Entomophagy, of Athens, Georgia, has launched a open-sourced website that will become the definitive source of information on entomophagy – a meeting-place for researchers and practitioners with visionary interests and goals. We are at www.worldento.com.

For now, we are seeking all manner of contributions. Although we’re happy to see basic articles such as, What is Entomophagy; Allergy Concerns; Wine Pairings for Insects; How to Prepare your Insects for Cooking; and General Recipes, we are more interested in the cultural and international aspects of entomophagy; the many disciplines involved (such as Entomology, Anthropology, Nutrition, Sociology, Psychology, Literature, Agriculture, Sustainable Studies, History, Engineering, Chemistry, Culinary, Marketing, etc.); and artwork, video, and creative writing. We’re also creating a gallery of cross-referenced images with captions: documentation of edible insects around the world.  Eventually we hope to publish original, peer-reviewed scientific papers.

Technical articles are welcome, and authors of such work will be asked to include short summaries in layman’s terms. In all cases we will prominently feature contributors’ names and other information they would like to include. Currently we cannot pay for content; the current budget is set for the site, though we may make exceptions for some articles. We would be happy to discuss the possibility of barter (edible insect products in exchange for articles) or terms for future compensation (within reason).

The other major development is EDIBL – The Environmental Discourses of the Ingestion of Bugs League. This student-group model was founded by Rena Chen, a food-anthropology major at Princeton, in 2010. Other chapters have started at The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, the University of Texas, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. There are big plans to continue growing nationally and internationally, to pool resources and increase awareness. While college/university campuses might be the best setting for such enterprises, EDIBL’s founders would welcome other kinds of groups. Hopefully, the evolution of multiple chapters would encourage collaboration, friendly competition, and perhaps conferences.

There are Facebook pages for both “World Entomophagy” and “EDIBL Nation,” as well as Twitter.  If social media holds no interest for you, email me at sagoman401@gmail.com and I’ll answer any questions you have. As the main editor of the site, I’d be delighted to see anything you might like to contribute.

The future of this subject is very bright; consider joining us. According to the FAO, climate scientists, and other experts, there’s a very good chance that humanity’s future will have a lot more bugs in it.

Filed under: Entomology, Food, Insects Tagged: cooking, eating, entomophagy
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I will be out of the virtual office for a few days–I have to travel off to the West Coast.

I am hoping I can pick up the latest movie from Aardman Studios while I am out there.  Sadly, the original title, shown in this PR photo, has been changed for the US to remove the word “Scientists.”

“By downplaying the presence of a plasticine Charles Darwin (voiced by David Tennant) in the film’s marketing, the studio probably figures it has more of a chance of getting box office numbers in the Bible belt. The mere mention of ‘Science’ or ‘Charles Darwin’ is enough to make some extreme Creationists flip out, call forth hellfire and brimstone and lynch a chimpanzee by the highway.”

Le Sigh.

But it’s always an adventure with scientists, even if you don’t label it that way.  Sometimes you have an adventure even before you get to the science part–I’m thinking here of the time I was pulled over at a rural traffic stop and had to explain why the following items were in the back of my car:

• Axe
• Shovel
• Machete
• Large black plastic garbage bags
• Rubber gloves
• A jar with cyanide in it
• Air filtering face mask
• 2 old and dirty white sheets

It took quite a while for them to be convinced that I wasn’t up to anything other than a collecting trip for insects in dead logs.  ”Really, Officer! These are standard tools for entomologists!”

What’s YOUR favorite science adventure? 

Filed under: Entomology, Insects, Random, Science Tagged: aardman, Darwin, stories
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The winners have been announced in the 2012 Hexapod Haiku Challenge!
You can see all of them on the NCSU Insect Museum Blog.

I especially liked this one, probably because I am contemplating some big changes in my life right now:

Molting is a must
The vehicle is renewed
Same old heavy soul

Anish Thakkar; Raleigh, NC

Filed under: Entomology, Insects Tagged: haiku, poetry
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Once again, another year has gone by and it’s World Malaria Day.  There has actually been a lot of good news in the last few years; overall, deaths and infection have decreased.  But.

From the Roll Back Malaria Coalition:

The theme for World Malaria Day 2012 - “Sustain Gains, Save Lives: Invest in Malaria” - marks a decisive juncture in the history of malaria control. Whether the malaria map will keep shrinking, as it has in the past decade, or be reclaimed by the malaria parasites, depends, to a great extent, on the resources that will be invested in control efforts over the next years.

Investments in malaria control have created unprecedented momentum and yielded remarkable returns in the past years. In Africa, malaria deaths have been cut by one third within the last decade; outside of Africa, 35 out of the 53 countries, affected by malaria, have reduced cases by 50% in the same time period. In countries where access to malaria control interventions has improved most significantly, overall child mortality rates have fallen by approximately 20%.

However, these gains are fragile and will be reversed unless malaria continues to be a priority for global, regional and national decision-makers and donors. Despite the current economic climate, development aid needs to continue flowing to national malaria control programs to ensure widespread population access to life-saving and cost-effective interventions.

I have written in past years about some of the really wonderful progress that has been made.  Unfortunately, we have controlled all the easy places. Now, as the coalition says in their statement, the gains are fragile.

You might have seen the news a few weeks ago that a drug resistant strain of malaria has arisen in Asia. If malaria becomes resistant to artemisinin, there are no other drugs to treat with. Much of current malaria control relies on a combined 1-2 punch of bed nets and drug treatment.  When populations are displaced due to political unrest, or when economies tank and programs are discontinued, those at risk of malaria lose access to medicine and regular housing. Which puts them even more at risk.

The warning note from the RBM Coalition statement I quoted above is repeated in a new paper that came out this week:

Cohen, J., Smith, D., Cotter, C., Ward, A., Yamey, G., Sabot, O., & Moonen, B. (2012). Malaria resurgence: a systematic review and assessment of its causes Malaria Journal, 11 (1) DOI: 10.1186/1475-2875-11-122  

The article is a major review of control efforts on multiple continents over the last 80 years. They find that the greatest issue in controlling malaria is economic, not biological:

“Considerable declines in malaria have accompanied increased funding for control since the year 2000, but historical failures to maintain gains against the disease underscore the fragility of these successes. Although malaria transmission can be suppressed by effective control measures, in the absence of active intervention malaria will return to an intrinsic equilibrium determined by factors related to ecology, efficiency of mosquito vectors, and socioeconomic characteristics….

The review identified 75 resurgence events in 61 countries, occurring from the 1930s through the 2000s. Almost all resurgence events (68/75 = 91%) were attributed at least in part to the weakening of malaria control programmes for a variety of reasons, of which resource constraints were the most common (39/68 = 57%). Over half of the events (44/75 = 59%) were attributed in part to increases in the potential for malaria transmission, while only 24/75 (32%) were attributed to vector or drug resistance. ”  [emphasis mine]

Nearly all of the 75 resurgence events identified through this review have been ascribed to some aspect of weakening of the malaria control programme, whether because of funding shortages, complacency following successful reductions, or disruptions caused by war or natural disaster. These results suggest that technical problems such as vector resistance appear historically to have been of secondary importance for resurgence to financial and operational factors.”

This research is important, because we need to learn from our failures of the past, not repeat them.  The places that are most at risk of malaria are also places where there is political unrest and little budget to support a malaria control program.

This is why “Sustain Gains” is the theme of World Malaria Day this year. We have made amazing progress-but we have in the past, too. Only by sustained effort–funded by everyone–can we continue to progress.  Nothing but Nets is trying to supply bed nets to the Sudan–if you can, consider donating!

———–

As an addendum: every time I write about malaria, some pro-DDT trolls show up. From the paper:

One of DDT’s chief advantages is its low cost [59], and programmes that could no longer use it due to resistance were required to switch to more expensive insecticides, raising the cost of interventions and making them harder to sustain [75]. If, however, resistance to multiple pesticides was the primary driver of resurgence, it would have been extremely difficult to counteract, since vector control, one of the most effective tools available to malaria control programmes, would have proven useless. Instead, however, regions that made a determined effort were able to continue to make gains against malaria despite the obstacle of resistance.

Filed under: Insects, Malaria, Science Tagged: bednets, world malaria day
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Alas, Starbucks has backpedaled and decided to remove cochineal from all its food and drink products. This is a shame, since as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, cochineal is an insect-derived dye that provides an important source of cash for a lot of rural Central and South American people. There is also evidence the culture and sale of cochineal leads to more independence and higher female literacy in Mexico.

The news coverage of this story is also a shame, because once again the myth that the cochineal insect is a beetle is on the rounds.

Not. A. Beetle.

Not even closely related to a beetle.  In fact, the closest common ancestor shared by a scale insect and a beetle would be around 372 Million Years Ago.

Obviously, as an entomologist, I can be expected to get upset about things like taxonomic mistakes. But for the average news reader, does it really matter that cochineal isn’t accurately identified?  I think it does, and that’s because the error is one that we would not tolerate, or would mock, if it happened with a vertebrate animal.

Let’s say Wikipedia replaced Einstein’s photo with that of a chimpanzee.   We would immediately recognize this mistake, since chimps are not the same as humans. We last shared a common ancestor 6.4 million years ago.

Alex Wild uses this comparison as the baseline for his calculation of the excellent Taxonomy Fail Index:

A = the actual taxon of the pictured organism
B = the taxon as misidentified
T = the number of million years since A and B shared a common ancestor
H = the number of million years since humans and our closest relatives, the chimps, shared a common ancestor.

Taxonomy Fail Index (TFI) = T/H

In other words, the Taxonomy Fail Index scales the amount of error in absolute time against the error of misidentifying a human with a chimp.

So, in my example of Einstein and a chimp, the Taxonomy Fail Index = 1.

Let’s look at another example: say Einstein’s photo is confused with one of a cat. That error has a Taxonomy Fail Index of 15; over 94 million years separate the common ancestors of humans and kitties.

Using this scale, how big is the error of mistaking a cochineal scale insect for a beetle? That’s a Taxonomy Fail Index of 58.

A mistake in classification that large would mean that a photo of a human would have to be replaced with a….FROG.

That is a rather large mistake.

Confusing a highly social placental mammal with a large brain for an amphibian.  An egg laying animal that breeds in water, grows through a tadpole stage, and breathes through its skin.

THAT is why I get really aggravated with the taxonomic mistake of calling a scale insect a beetle.  It is a huge error.   It’s not just that I’m being an anal-retentive entomologist that insists that my obscure disciplinary taxonomic language be recognized by all.  (Ok, maybe a little of that. But not only that.)

This sort of taxonomic carelessness is why some really amazing mistakes are made, and leads to news organizations pretty much tossing random photos of any old beetle on their stories.

It also leads to misinformation about cochineal itself–this story, for example, mentions “smashed up wings and finely ground tiny legs.”  There won’t be any wings or legs in the dye, primarily because the insects are crushed and the pigment extracted. No parts are left behind.  The other main reason is that the dye-producing female insects don’t have wings.  They hardly have any legs, either.

Scale insects don’t undergo complete metamorphosis as a beetle would, so they don’t have larvae and pupae.  In fact, scales have their own special freaky system of growth and reproduction in which the females loose their legs and turn into a sort of tiny insect Jabba the Hutt, and even tinier males fertilize them and die.

News stories like the one I quoted above referring to wings and legs are just feeding the OMGINSECTSINMAIFOODZ freakout over cochineal.  It’s not accurate, and it’s sloppy journalism.

Careless sourcing of images on news stories results in lots of Taxonomy Fails; in some cases, it can be a public health issue.  This news article about bed bugs actually had a photo of a flea right above the caption “many people cannot identify bed bugs.”  Gosh, you think the fact that incorrect photos are all over the web might have something to do with that?

And now I’m going to stomp off in an entomological huff. Exit stage right.

More information about cochineal and edible insects:

• Greenfield, Amy Butler. 2005. A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire. HarperCollins Publishers Inc., New York.
• Cochineal: it’s a bug AND a feature
• Are there roaches in your coffee and chocolate? Um. Yes.
• Shellac: It’s a bug AND a feature
• Nutritional value of insects

Filed under: Entomology, Food, Insects, Science Tagged: carmine, cochineal, FAIL, fail index, LOLfrog, media, red dye, taxonomy
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