Wasps eating the meat of a dead snake

The title of this post pretty much sums up all this photo is. Yes, these wasps have come across a dead snake and are chowing down on its yummy meat:

Found on Reddit, this picture drew some interesting commentary. One knowledge Redditor pointed out that wasps do eat meat and protein, or rather their young do:

'It's how they feed their young. The adult wasps only need flower nectar and other sugars to fuel their life processes, but the larvae need proteins to grow into adults. As such, adult wasp also hunt and scavenge for sources of protein that they don't even eat themselves. When they get back to the hive, they chew it up into meatballs and give them to the larvae one at a time. The larvae even scratch the sides of their cells to make noise to get the attention of worker wasps and say that they are hungry.'

With an attitude like that, it's no wonder most people prefer bees... If I was a wasp, I'd sure want to test the ph of that meat, maybe with an Apera Pocket Tester.

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Is is true Praying Mantis eat each other after sex?

The Praying Mantis

The Praying Mantis has to be the coolest bug or critter on the planet I reckon. For two reasons. They are usually green and green is the coolest colour and two, the female apparently eats the male after copulations. We'll look into that in a minute but first I thought about why I'm doing a post on the Mighty Mantis!

I had a wonderful Easter lunch at a friend's where their 1 year old had a pet Praying Mantis - and whilst he was playing in the sun porch he found another. His dad put in in the jar with the original and, the excitement over we went and had lunch. 

Post chicken and potatoes we had a look at how the green-eyed monsters were playing. NOT TOO FRIENDLY! The original mantis was half way through eating his new jar mate, and in doing so proving to me that Pray Mantis do eat each other!

A colloquial name for the order is "praying mantises", because of the typical "prayer-like" stance, although the term is often misspelled as "preying mantis" since mantises are predatory

Although the praying mantis is known for its cannibalistic mating process in actuality it only occurs 5-31% of the time. Which kind makes me think those are some crap odds!


Apparently in laboratory set conditions of bright lights and confinement, the female mantis is more likely to eat the male as means of survival. A scientist once reported:


"In nature, mating usually takes place under cover, so rather than leaning over the tank studying their every move, we left them alone and videotaped what happened. We were amazed at what we saw. Out of thirty matings, we didn't record one instance of cannibalism, and instead we saw an elaborate courtship display, with both sexes performing a ritual dance, stroking each other with their antennae before finally mating.


OK so that's a little better then.


There is one species, however, the Mantis religiosa, in which it is necessary that the head be removed for the mating to take effect properly. Sexual cannibalism occurs most often if the female is hungry. But eating the head does causes the body to ejaculate faster....

The mantis has an huge appetite and some have been known to eat up to sixteen crickets a day, but this is not limited to just insects. They are well known to be carnivorous and cannibalistic, and only eat live prey in both nymph and adult stages. Praying Mantis are well known to love eating flies but hey have also been documented  as eating 21 species of insects, soft-shelled turtles, mice, frogs, birds, and delicious newts. 

Although the European mantis was introduced to the mighty United States to eat the horrible insects that destroy precious farm crops, other species are known informally as "soothsayers," "devil's horses," "mule killers," and "camel crickets" since their saliva was mistakenly thought to poison farm livestock. That was probably the Armish. I'm suggesting it was them because according to the stereotype I've gleaned from film and tv, they don't apparently have the internet so I'm in the clear. 

Not many people know that the the mantis can lash out at remarkable speed as it catches prey.  Prey items are caught and held securely with grasping, spiked forelegs. Check out this butterfly photo below:

Butterdead

Wasp being eaten by the Mantis

A fly being eaten

Fried Fly Wing for dinner

Said the grasshopper to the mantis?

Here's the classic picture of a praying mantis some how managing to hold onto a fucking bird. Maybe it was the most hungry mantis in the history of the entire species? I can respect that, it reminds me of this snake pulling up a kangaroo up a cliff. 

Bird attacked by a Praying Mantis

Leave a Comment bees, birds, bugs and critters, butterfly, fly, praying mantis, wasp

Do Bees have teeth? How do they sting?

?

Look ma, I'm using my mandibles!

Do bees have teeth? The answer is that bees do not have teeth. They have mandibles. Except for the Queen Bee. Source: My Wife. The End.

Now that that's sorted, I can talk about more important issues. It was Billy Piper the former jailbait singer from Britain that once sang the line, "Honey to the bee, that's me for you" - as such is the regard humans have for bees, we like to relate our stories about love and life to bees. Hence the expression 'birds and the bees'.

She used to bee so sweet and innocent before she did that show on hookers....

Anyways, I have no idea where this line of reasoning is taking me, perhaps I should have eaten a meal today. All I know is that sex sells. Now that we have that settled, let's check out some cool pictures of bees. Not bears for once. Just bees. And maybe some birds eating bees. But not birds eating out bees. That would be the wrong demographic for Animals Eating Animals to focus on....

Pollen makes the world go round. Like money.

Purple is the new black for any fashionable bee this season

The pictures of bees in the above pictures, Billie Piper aside, suggest that bees are friendly enough. But what about all this talk of killer bees? The ones that can sting a man to death?

Africanized honey bees, known colloquially as "killer bees," are hybrids of the African honey bee with various European honey bees such as the Italian bee thrown in to spice things up a little bit. Mamma Mia!

These bees are apprently far more aggressive than the European subspecies. Small swarms of African honey bees are capable of taking over European honey beehives by invading the hive and establishing their own queen after killing the European queen. Killer diller eh?

Oops!

When I was a wee nipper on a Scout camp, I got a bee sting on my finger and bugger me it hurt. The scout leader took one look at it and said he'd have to cut my finger off with his knife because it was the worst bee sting he'd ever seen. That sure cheered me up! Bee stings often affect people as a result of the histamine injection - the body reacts to the bee's 'poison' and swells up as a result. Check out this bee sting to the face below:

Lady stung near her eye

It's widely known that bees can only sting once and then they die however this is a partial misconception: although the bee's stinger is in fact barbed so that it lodges in the victim's skin, tearing loose from the bee's abdomen and leading to its death in minutes, this only happens if the skin of the victim is sufficiently thick, such as a human's. Generally speaking, nature didn't really intend for honey bees to attack humans, just other bees.

Stung on the lips. Literally, he has bee sting lips!

The honey bee's sting is considered to have evolved for inter-bee combat between members of different hives, and the barbs serve to improve penetration of the chitinous plates of another insect's exoskeleton. So nature designed honey bees to sting other bees all day and not die, but when they sting a thick skinned animal, it's all over red rover.

Some people have no fears about getting stung by bees and are happy to wear a swarm of bees as their Halloween costume:

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