Move over, Miss Chiquita, there's a new fruit-n-veggie headress in town ... Behold the Hanayui series by Japanese flower artist Takaya over at Dezeen blog: Link - via Notcot

The latest from Parry Gripp (previously). Even vegetables haters will like this song! -via Buzzfeed

This 1948 advertisement for a “radioactive soil conditioner” promises a 20% increase in your tomato, beet, lettuce, and carrot crops. What could possibly go wrong? Link -via Boing Boing

Image via Thomas G. Moertel [Wikipedia]

Beetles are one of the most common types of animals in the world. There are already 350,000 known species, but scientists believe there could be up to 8 million more. New beetle species are discovered at an amazing rate of about one per hour. With so many different types of beetles, it’s hardly surprising there are around 750,000 trillion beetles on earth!

The secret to the beetle’s success is its ability to adapt to almost any environment. They can fly, swim and burrow and different species can survive on anything from tobacco to bonemeal to carpet to strychnine to fiber insulators on cables. The also survive in all types of habitats. One species, the zonocopris gibbicolis survives exclusively on the feces of land snails, living in the best possible place to get that meal –inside the snail’s shell.

As if their diets and living quarters weren’t weird enough, some beetles also have seriously strange breeding habits. The flour beetle (seen above) has sperm that attaches to the members of other beetles that breed with the same female. The sperm has a long shelf life and can then go on to fertilize the eggs of other female beetles. In fact, the female flour beetle has a one in eight chance of being fertilized by a male she never even encountered before.

Image via ©Entomart [Wikipedia]

The blister beetle spreads its larvae with the help of digger bees (pictured above) in what is called a honeytrap. The larvae cling together and form the shape of a female digger bee while emitting bee pheromones. A male digger bee will then approach the trap and attempt to mate with it, giving the larvae a chance to cling onto his chest hairs and hitch a ride to an actual mate. When they get the chance, the larvae then grab on to the female bee and catch a ride to the inside of the hive where they can feed on young bees and honey.

Don’t think for a second that bees are always the innocent victims of beetles though. The stingless bee (pictured below) takes revenge on invading beetles not by striking them down, but by mummifying their bodies in large amounts of resin, mud and wax. The beetle then slowly suffocates before shriveling up like a mummy corpse.

Image via Muhammad Mahdi Karim [Wikipedia]

Bees are fascinating creatures aside from their fighting skills. Outside of humans, bees have the most sophisticated communication systems in the animal kingdom. They can tell each other exactly how to get to a food source and how good the food is using a series of different movements. This method of communication is known as the “waggle dance.” Humans can actually translate the waggle dance and scientists can actually track down a specific flower that one bee mentions to another while under observation.

Bees also have fairly good memories. They can remember human faces in laboratory tests –of course, they were given nectar every time they were shown a certain face, so they really just thought the face was a weird type of flower .

The ancient Greeks, Egyptians and Babylonians believed the insects were sacred, thanks in part to their ability to provide humans with honey. Bees are the only animal to provide us with a food source that isn’t milk or meat. Honey is the only food that will never go bad. Archeologists have even eaten honey that was buried in three-thousand year-old tombs of the Pharaohs.

Of course, while humans love honey, it’s not the only food source that bees are responsible for. The insects pollinate many of our fruit and vegetable crops –over $19 billion worth in the U.S. alone.

Unfortunately, that means we depend on bees for the majority of our fruits and veggies. With colony collapse disorder rates increasing all the time while scientists argue about the cause, the entire bee population –and our food supply is at risk. If the colony collapse disorder manages to eradicate the entire bee population, we’ll not only be eating a lot less food in general, we’ll have to start eating a lot more beans, corn, tomatoes and beets.

Because beets are incredibly nutritious and pollinated by the wind, they are one of the staple crops that scientists believe we would be forced to eat regularly if bee colonies completely collapse. But that’s not the only thing to make these veggies special.

Image via Quadell [Wikipedia]

While we tend to think about the red-bulbed beetroots when we hear the word “beet,” there are actually many varieties of beets including the sugar beet and Swiss chard. Beets were first cultivated around 4,000 BC and have been grown across Europe and Asia for thousands of years. During its early history, the most commonly grown beets were the leafy varieties, but after spinach cultivation began, interest turned to the beetroot and sugar beets.

If you think that you don’t eat beets, you’re probably wrong. Not only is 30% of all sugar manufactured made from sugar beets rather than sugar canes, many commercial food products use beetroots for coloring and as a natural sweetener. Of course, if you love beets and eat too many, you’ll most certainly realize it –your urine will turn pink.

Image via Darkone [Wikipedia]

While beets may not be at the mercy of bees for pollination, they can still be victimized by other insects –particularly beetles. Those bee-hating blister beetles mentioned above (and pictured directly above) have a soft spot for potatoes, but their second favorite food is beets. While these beetles can destroy whole crops of beets, anyone who finds them on their veggies is well advised not to remove the bugs by hand –they’re named blister beetles after the injuries they give humans. The beetles secrete a chemical called a vesicant that causes swelling, blisters and burning sensations. The injuries often turn black, leave scars and become infected.

What do you guys think about the beetles, bees and beets connection? Are there any other strange connections you’d like to see explored in more detail?

Sources: The Book of Animal Ignorance, Scientific American, Google Books, Wikipedia #1, #2, #3

Andy Ellison posts animated images of food on his site Inside Insides. What you see here is an MRI of an onion. The bright spot that appears is actually a bruise! You can also see MRI scans of bell peppers, green beans, persimmons, and much more. Link -via Everlasting Blort

The salak fruit, native to Indonesia, has an outer skin resembling that of a snake. The pulp inside divides into three edible lobes. Agriculture Guide has pictures of this fruit and fourteen other odd-looking fruits and vegetables.

Link via The Presurfer | Photo by Flickr user Jayson Emery used under Creative Commons license

Carrots have not always been orange; originally they were purple and in the future, there may be rainbow colored carrots.

Link – via uniqueunusualandinterestingart

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by KMOM14.

She suffers from a fear known as lachanophobia, which leaves her sweating and stricken with panic attacks at the merest sight of a sprout or a pea…

“People might think it is a bit of a laughable affliction but I have a genuine fear of greens it’s not just that I dislike the taste of sprouts or broccoli, but the actual sight of them fills me with dread and I could never touch them.”

The unusual fear affects just a few thousand people in Britain…

The fact that she has gone public with her affliction shows that she does not have gelotophobia.  You can find your phobia here.

Link.  Image credit to 365 Halloween.  For a scarier creation see the “Vegetalien” of digital artist Till Nowak, and for a less frightening one, see Giuseppe Arcimboldo‘s work.

A fruit — a ‘true fruit’ — is one where all tissues are derived from the plant ovary and this alone. This includes peas. Whereas strawberries, for example, also include some of the flesh from the peg that holds the ovary, disqualifying them from fruit status. The apple gets its carpels involved as well as the ovary, leading to a kinky pome. ‘True berries’ are also ‘true fruits’, but not the other way round. Grapes, currants (red and black), elder- and gooseberries are all proper upstanding berries which will not deceive you or smuggle themselves into your house in pies before stealing your silver while you sleep.

Whatever you call them, you should have five servings a day, and eat a variety of different whatever-they-ares. Link -via Scribal Terror

Allergic to tomatoes? It’s more likely than you think – up to 16 percent of people are sensitive to tomatoes, adding extra complications to life in a world of free-flowing ketchup, tomato sauce and burgers with the works. It’s not tomatoes themselves that are at fault, it’s a small protein called Profilin. By silencing two genes responsible for Profilin production in tomatoes, scientists can create non-allergenic fruit that are otherwise completely normal in taste, texture and appearance.

Link

Previously: 7 Intriguing Genetically Modified Fruits and Vegetables.

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by scaryman.

Here is a sweet video of a cupcake who dreams of sailing away and leaving it’s life all behind for an adventure. A very cool stop motion video created by Kirsten Lepore using veggies, fruits, and sweet snacks. After watching this I just felt like having a salad and then a cupcake afterward as a treat. It’s a good 10 minutes of a video so I highly suggest you eat along as you watch…so grab a snack and enjoy!

Kirsten’s website – Link

Think you know your fruits from your veggies? Slashfood doesn’t think so. Take their quick quiz – just scribble your answers down on a scrap piece of paper or remember them in your head. I have to admit, I did worse than I thought I would. Photo via Wikipedia user Gpics.

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