Sunday, January 3, 2010

Invading Beetles Mummified By Stingless Bees


From New Scientist:

It's not so much eternal life, more a case of instant death. Parasitic beetles that dare to invade the hive of certain stingless bees end up entombed forever in resin. "They're stopped in their tracks and they dehydrate and shrivel up like a mummy," says Mark Greco, an entomologist at the Swiss Bee Research Centre in Bern who discovered the practice in a species of Australian stingless bees, Trigona carbonaria, living in the wild.

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