Food
This is a bird which breeds in open country in warmer climates. Just as the name suggests, bee-eaters predominantly eat insects, especially bees, wasps and hornets which are caught in the air by sorties from an open perch. Before eating its meal, a European Bee-eater removes the sting by repeatedly hitting the insect on a hard surface. It eats some 250 bees daily. Lizards and frogs are also taken. The most important prey item in their diet are Hymenoptera, mostly Apis mellifera; a study in Spain found that these comprise 69.4% to 82% of the European bee-eaters' diet. Their impact on bee populations however is small; they eat less than 1% of the worker bees in the area in which they live.
A study found that European bee-eaters "convert food to body weight more efficiently if they are fed a mixture of bees and dragonflies than if they eat only bees or only dragonfiles."
Read more about this topic: European Bee-eater
Famous quotes containing the word food:
“God gave the righteous man a certificate entitling him to food and raiment, but the unrighteous man found a facsimile of the same in God’s coffers, and appropriated it, and obtained food and raiment like the former. It is one of the most extensive systems of counterfeiting that the world has seen.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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—Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)
“Who doth ambition shun,
And loves to live i’ th’ sun,
Seeking the food he eats,
And pleased with what he gets,
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—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)