I love weird scents, and am constantly on the lookout for something unusual. So on the way to looking up a source for some materials that I want to tincture (I’ll write about them in another post) I found
this South African website which is a store and several blogs all in one. I was thrilled to see a
fascinating post about how male African orchid bees create their own signature scents by collecting aromatic materials from flowers, rotten wood and fruit, feces, and tree resins, concentrating them in special lipid-containing pockets on their legs in a process similar to
enfleurage. Each bee creates his own signature scent. Presumably the more materials a male bee collects and the more attractive the resulting perfume, the better he is at attracting females. The ultimate "chick magnet".
I never cease to marvel at the ingenuity of nature. If I were independently wealthy I would take a trip to South Africa just to smell a euglossine bee’s leg pockets. How wonderful and weird would that be?
[Photo of an insect that appears to be an orchid bee adapted from Wikimedia]
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