This project was triggered by my observation that honey bee colonies are frequently visited by birds that feed on the dead bees on the ground in the vicinity of honey bee colonies.

Especially at the beginning of the year dead bees are removed by younger workers (undertaker behavior). During the season the majority of old bees just do not return from their flight (self-removal behavior). This means there is a continuously “production” of dead bees, that offer a rich source of many amino acids, are easy to excess, and are sparsely, but regularly distributed over many landscapes.

To quantify the anecdotally description of this behaviour I used camera traps at several colonies. Questions I aimed to address include the potential modulators of such behaviour (e.g. rural vs urban landscape) and the potential large scale ecosystem effect of human beekeeping on birds.

The data from this project have not been used for a scientific publication and are freely available: https://zenodo.org/record/6976111