How many Bees does a Bee-eater eat?

No, it's not a tongue twister or a riddle but you will have to read on to find the answer to that question!

The day before yesterday I was washing up the breakfast things and staring idly out of the window wondering if it was misty or whether the windows could really be that salt-encrusted and grubby (and yes, they could and yes, they were!), when I saw a small flock of birds hovering and diving over the back garden. Their colour was the first thing that I noticed, turquoise flashes with yellow and brown and they were diving and catching insects in mid-flight. Occasionally they perched on the antenna wire that we have strung across the length of the garden, but they were far too fast for me to capture with my camera, I would have snapped sky and the odd bit of bush and no bird at all! So I borrowed these pictures from Google!

Like a painted porcelain statue! (Thanks to Google)

They were European Bee-eaters or Merops apiaster, migratory birds from Europe, arriving for our summer. There are two schools of thought as to whether they actually breed in Southern Africa, or simply enjoy the weather before heading back to breed in Europe during their summer. There are two main migration tracks depending on where they come from. The birds from South West Europe go through the Strait of Gibraltar to fly south through Sahara to West Africa. The birds that arrive here in South Africa come from Eastern Europe via Israel. It's a long, dangerous journey for these little birds, and only 1 out of 3 will return in Spring, having faced not only natural hazards like weather, but (expletive deleted) people who deliberately put nets across their way to catch them.

Both sexes have the vibrant colours.

Their diet consists of bees (what else?), wasps, hornets, all the nasty stinging things! They remove the sting by hitting the insect repeatedly on a hard surface. Their nests are tunnelled into sandy banks on river shores and the female will lay between 5 and 8 eggs at the beginning of June. Both the male and female will sit on the eggs for the three weeks that they take to hatch. That's as long as a chicken takes to hatch!

Here's the bit that I like, share this with the men around you! During courtship the male feeds the female with the larger items, keeping the smaller ones for himself! That's chivalry!

Rob and I watched them for about twenty minutes, then as suddenly as they had arrived, they had gone, moved on to enchant another observer.

And the answer to the question? They eat less than 1% of the worker bees in the areas in which they feed. That's a lot less than I thought.