Not to beat a dead horse, but I just thought I’d share a few thoughts. First, bumblebees do indeed have stingers. Honeybees have a three pronged barbed stinger that sticks in mammal flesh, and as a result when honey bees sting mammals, the stinger—along with a portion of their innards—comes off when they sting mammals. Honey bees can sting other insects over and over, but something about the barbed nature of their stingers makes them stick in mammal flesh.
While I respect any keeper’s decision to allow his/her Cham to eat bees, wasps, etc., the operative word is “allow”. I don’t know many folks who advocate catching bees and feeding them off like crix. Most fans of bees usually just say if you have the opportunity to allow your Cham to tag a bee or two, that’s a good thing. In all fairness, I know of no study into wild chameleon bee stings, so any evidence here is going to be anecdotal; however, there is plenty of empirical evidence that wild chameleons of all shapes and sizes regularly eat hymenopterans. The articles and their findings can be found in my blog on gutloading. Anyways, the big point is allowing your Cham to tag a few bees is different from trying to hand feed your cham a bee—regardless of whether you have removed the stinger or not. Chams, unsurprisingly, are pretty good at tagging all manner of flying insect from branches/leaves, etc. Thousands of years of evolution has I’m used them with a robust ability to tag, shock and crunch without injury. When is humans interject ourselves into that process, it should be no surprise that things go wrong.
I know, typos, and I talk way too much. Noted! Here’s my take, allow your Cham to tag bees, or don’t. But if you do, allow the Cham to take care of business on his/her own; don’t interfere, or try to micromanage.
finally, here’s a few pics of some of my outdoor enclosures. Note the adjacent beehives.
This is her today and the spot is smaller with less yellow.
