Cuidado con el cuco!!!
Halloween is almost here and I wanted to share this little history, in Latin America, we have the cuco, it is our version of the boogie man, if you are not a good kid or if you don’t behave the boogie man will come for you… this always scared the bejesus out of me when I was a little kid.
As time passed and I grew up to become a biologist who studies native bees (melittologist) and I discovered another kind of cuco (actually cuckoo), but no less terrifying, the cuckoo bees…
The cuckoo bees are a large and diverse group belonging to Anthophila, their life has a complex ecological system they parasite other bees. As cuckoo birds, the cuckoo bees put their own eggs in the nest of other species the scientific term for this behavior is cleptoparasitism a word that came from the greek that will translate to parasitism by theft. Most bees are solitaries and need to do many of the labors alone, construct the nest, clean the nest, collect pollen, etc. When the nest is not guarded meaning the mom bee is out collecting pollen and nectar for their babies, is when the cuckoo bee attacks, she looks for the nest and in the interior looks for the cozy cells were she puts her own eggs. In most of the cases, the cuckoo’s larvae develop faster than the host larvae, and also it is armed with sharp and potent mandibles which use to kill the right heir.
At the Oklahoma City Zoo, we found many different species of cuckoo bees, and besides our prejudges about the cuckoo bees they play a fundamental role in the ecosystems. First, they are population controllers, meaning they keep in check the populations of their hosts. Second, they are ecological indicators, with their presence we can infer that we are in a healthy environment, they are on a higher scale on the food chain, founding cuckoos means their host also is present in the environment and you need high numbers of the host to maintain populations of cuckoos.
Some of the OKC Zoo’s Cuckoo bees
