• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

The Mexican Honey Wasp Can Produce Honey Just As Good As Any Bee

February 28, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

Wasps, let’s face facts here, are not everybody’s favorite insect. Despite playing important roles in pollination and regulating plant pests, they still lose out heavily in the PR war to their old rivals the bee.

In fact, one attitude survey in 2018 found that wasps were “universally disliked by the public”, which is unfair on an insect that also regulates other insects known to carry human diseases. The negative attitude towards wasps, which pollinate crops as they search for nectar just like bees do although not to the same extent, likely comes from encounters with yellowjacket wasps. These are the classic yellow and black-striped social wasps, which can become aggressive and sting people, particularly as their food supply becomes scarce.

Advertisement

Though these are the wasps humans are most likely to encounter, they make up less than 1 percent of stinging wasps. There are approximately 100,000 species of wasps in the world, most of them not ruining your picnic.

One species of wasp will actually enhance your picnic, given that it produces honey.



Despite bees getting all the glory, honey production does not stop at bees. Honeypot ants have their own particularly strange way of storing this “honey”, inside the abdomens of their comrades.  Though some wasps will produce a small amount of honey in their nest, Mexican honey wasps (Brachygastra mellifica) are one of the only wasps that make honey on a large scale like bees, producing it in huge honeycombs by regurgitating nectar into their nest.

Advertisement

The wasps, smaller than a honey bee and black in color, get pollen stuck to their hairy bodies, and pollinate crops as they go. These wasps were likely among the first pollinators of avocados in Central America, before the arrival of the honeybee.

What is surprising about the wasp, is that they bear little relation to bees.

“They’re really interesting because they’re really distant relatives of the honey bee,” Dr Elli Leadbeater from the Institute of Zoology and Zoological Society of London explained in a YouTube video, “and so genetically they’re very different but they do exactly the same behavior. We want to know if it’s the same genes that control the behavior in both species.”

The wasps make less honey than bees, but it is just as edible to humans. Its flavor is described as like maple syrup. Samples of the honey have found it contained sunflower, mesquite, and honeydew.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. ‘Dear Evan Hansen’ opens hybrid Toronto Film Festival
  2. Honeywell, Wood aim to make sustainable aviation fuel cleaner
  3. Elevate launches its approach to managing pre-tax benefits with $12M Series A
  4. Formula Calculate Any Digit Of Pi, Nobody Noticed For Centuries

Source Link: The Mexican Honey Wasp Can Produce Honey Just As Good As Any Bee

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Why Do We Call It A “Hamburger” When It Doesn’t Contain Ham?
  • What Aristotle Got Wrong About The Octopus
  • The World’s Largest Island Is Shrinking And Shifting
  • Record-Breaking Marshmallow Planet – It’s A Cold, Peculiar World On A Very Slanted Orbit
  • Distinctive Rocks Might Be Remnants Of Earth Before The Collision That Made The Moon
  • Bright Northern Lights Across America Expected This Week As 3 Coronal Mass Ejections Fly Towards Earth
  • Brain Implant Enables Paralyzed Man To Feel And Use Objects Using Someone Else’s Hands
  • “This Is A Really Big Deal”: Brain Training Significantly Improves Key Neurochemical Levels In World First
  • “Wholly Unexpected”: First-Ever Fossil Paranthropus Hand Raises Questions About Earliest Tool Makers’ Identity
  • For Centuries, Nobody Knew Why Swiss Cheese Has Holes. Then, The Mystery Was Solved.
  • Scientists Studied The Infamous “Chicago Rat Hole” And They Have Some Bad News
  • Massive 166-Million-Year-Old Sauropod Footprints Become The Longest Dinosaur Trackway In Europe
  • Do Spiders Dream? “After Watching Hundreds Of Spiders, There Is No Doubt In My Mind”
  • IFLScience Meets: ESA Astronaut Rosemary Coogan On Astronaut Training And The Future Of Space Exploration
  • What’s So Weird About The Methuselah Star, The Oldest We’ve Found In The Universe?
  • Why Does Red Wine Give Me A Headache? Many Scientists Blame It On The Grape Skins
  • Manta Rays Dive Way Deeper Than We Thought – Up To 1.2 Kilometers – To Explore The Seas
  • Prof Brian Cox Explains What He Finds “Remarkable” About Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS Story
  • Pioneering “Pregnancy Test” Could Identify Hormones In Skeletons Over 1,000 Years Old
  • The First Neolithic Self-Portrait? Stony Human Face Emerges In 12,000-Year-Old Ruins At Karahan Tepe
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version