Bug Eating Photo

Melissa Huang, 6 years old, shows her bravery by eating a live queen larva. The wooden strips she is holding has many "queen cells" on it. Honey bee workers will build these queen cells and deposite abundent food (royal jelly) into each of them, provided that the colony has no queen and one "grafts" one larva into each queen cell cup. This method is used to rear large number of queens or to produce royal jelly. Before harvesting the royal jelly, one has to remove the queen larva in each cell. Melissa ate two of these queen larvae after I showed to her that I can do that. Her 9 year old brother refused to give it a try.