Today’s bee lecture was on “Sensory Systems”. My eyes glazed over at the pictures of ganglia and such, but there was at least one good historical story involving bees’ sense of taste.
At some point during WWII, German authorities commandeered all the honey to send off to the troops. Of course, if you take away all the honey, the hives die, so the bee owners protested a bit. “No problem!” said the Überlords. “We’ll give you sugar to feed the bees.”
That was an excellent deal. The owners could abandon the bees and make a mint selling the sugar on the black market.
The Überlords were sneaky, though. Instead of giving the owners straight sugar, they added a bit of quinine to it. Bees aren’t particularly sensitive to bitterness, so they happily slurped it up. To humans, though, it was simply inedible.
End of story.
We tried “Hokie Honey”, from last year’s bee class. Not bad.
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