The Lobster/Bee Connection
While listening to last week’s show, something rattled in my brain when Rico and mead-maker guest William Bostwick compared boiling honey bees… to boiling lobsters. From the depths of my vast catalog of interesting-but-typically-useless food knowledge, I remembered a lobster/bee connection. Sure enough, a little Googling later, my hunch was confirmed.
Similar to your freaky, distant cousin with whom you can scarcely believe you share DNA, the lobster and the honey bee are both members of the Arthropod phylum: a classification of animals with exoskeletons and jointed limbs. While bees are technically insects, they do indeed fall into this classification — so you can think of them as little, angry flying lobsters. Which is either creepy or B-horror movie cool.
Bees are actually very gentle and not angry at all. They may become defensive if you mess with them. Other than that they don’t care at all what us puny humans are doing.