Beekeeper Eats Own Bees. Queen Is Not Amused.

Last weekend it was warm enough to properly inspect the hives. Turned out Hive2 had almost entirely filled their sacrificial drone comb and sealed almost all the cells so I was able to remove it and pop it in the freezer. This is done because varroa mites prefer to lay their eggs with the larger drone lavae than with workers, by sacrificing these developing drones beekeepers can physically remove large numbers of varroa from the colony and stop new mites hatching -if left unchecked the mites would weaken the colony to the point of collapse. Unlike ourselves bees are cold blooded and prettymuch grind to a halt as they cool down, on colder evenings you can sometimes see a bee or two stranded outside the hive coming to a stop till they warm up again next day -assuming nothing eats them in the night anyway, so freezing them is actually far more humane than it sounds.

Drone comb. After a week in the freezer.

It only needs 24 hours in the freezer to kill the occupants but I gave it week. The little white bits in the picture are uncapped cells containing drone larvae. Once frozen honeycomb becomes very brittle so I was able to break it up to remove the pupae and larvae.

Drone Larvae

The larvae look a lot like maggots. All they do is eat. They're normally very soft and delicate but frozen solid I was able to remove them whilst breaking up the comb. The trick was to work very fast and keep work on the comb a section at a time whilst I put the rest back into the freezer. If they defrosted and it'd been like trying to pick up vanilla ice cream with your fingertips.

Drone Pupae

Like a travelling salesman in a Kafka novella, which I haven't really read, the larvae undergo a metamorphosis. But unlike Gregor they become pupae before insects. With their white bodies and pink eyes they look like some kind of wierd honey bee vampire things. Aside from the protrusion of the cell caps from the comb the huge eyes are the giveaway that these are definitey drones and not workers.

I had a plan to count the varroa mites and drones in the comb to give me an idea how the colony was faring but having removed all the pupae and larvae I didn't actually spot a single mite. However just like faries, gods and Russel's Teapot just because you can't see something it doesn't mean it's not there, although I suspect in some of those cases it may not be. I think they may well have been frozen to the wax I was removing and the young mites may have been too small to spot or not even hatched from their eggs. Not a problem, they're out of the hive anyway. Now what to do with the dead larve and pupae? Well as the article title hints, with all the subtlety of a neon sign, I ate them.

242g of Drone Larvae, Pupae and a little wax

In the western world we don't eat insects. Well that's not really true. It's more accurate to say in the western world we like to think we don't eat insects, but we do. Remember that head cauliflower you bought last week from a large supermarket? Chances are it had a few dead passengers tucked away in it which you unknowingly enjoyed with your cauliflower cheese. Broccoli? Excellent source of vitamin C, iron and aphids. And it's not just the good stuff that includes a few things not on the ingredient list. Fancy a bar of chocolate? Well that'll probably contain some ground up bug life evenly distrubuted through out the whole bar. And have you actually looked at the bugs they have in cocoa growing countries? Moreish? They're proper chitin clad horror stories. Enjoy your Dairy Milk now. 8-D

Other cultures consider insects just another edible item on the great buffet table of life. They're low in fat, high in protein and far more environmentally friendly to farm than for example the pigs and cows which we're more used to seeing pieces of on our plates. Bee brood is about 80% protein whereas beef gets to about 60% -the bee brood is also far lower in fat too and has less ecological impact than the cow. Beef farming is a worryingly inefficient use of arable land. Bees on the other hand don't need any arable land at all. So, gross as the idea may be to our cultural sensibilities they're actually better for us and this great spinning rock we live on than our preferred protein sources. Entomophagy isn't entirely new to me, having previously cooked locusts and meal worms and bought cooked ants and the like from specialist suppliers. I've always thought it odd that whilst we'll decline a cricket that only eats living plants we'll happily pay through the nose for that carrion eating cockroach of the seabed, the lobster. It's all about the image and presentation I guess.

Right let's get off that soap box and back to the kitchen. Time to see what I can do with these dead baby boys :p I pulled out a couple of cookery books, in this case The Eat-A-Bug Cookbook and Creepy Crawly Cusine: The Gourmet Guide to Edible Insects. Three bee larvae recipes in one and one in the other. I opted for the simplest of the lot which is basically fry them in butter with a little salt and pepper for three minutes. Cooking doesn't really get much easier than that. Being drones I don't have to worry about stings or venom, they just don't have them.

Dub dub be dub dub dub
Golden brown texture like sun..

I decided to blanche them first by boiling them for a couple of minutes to remove any wax still adhering to them and as an extra step against bacteria -well we are talking about a pile of dead insects afterall. Then they were drained and fried in three batches with a drop of olive oil, a little Flora Light and a pinch of low sodium salt.

Well the proof is in the tasting so how where they? My housemate and I sampled them and TBH we were quite impressed. There was a nutty taste which reminded me of roasted giant ants -another eusocial insect and relative of the honey bee. Tasted slightly popcorny -possibly due to the flora? A little crunchy on the outside and softer on the inside. I served them up accompanied with boiled potatoes stir fried with chopped spring onion, tomato and black pepper, some baby spinach leaves and a dry beer to wash it down with.

Grub's up.