Cuckoo Bee

Cuckoo bees have abandoned nest-building, pollen-collecting, and offspring care entirely. Instead, they infiltrate the nests of other bee species and lay eggs that will consume the host's provisions. The female cuckoo bee waits for a host to leave her nest, enters quickly, deposits an egg near the host's egg, and departs. The cuckoo larva typically hatches first and kills the host offspring, then consumes the pollen provisions the host mother laboriously collected. The cuckoo has outsourced all parental investment to an unwitting surrogate.

The strategy requires sophisticated deception. Cuckoo bees have evolved to chemically mimic their hosts, producing cuticular hydrocarbons that match host species signatures. Without this chemical disguise, host bees would detect and kill the intruder. Some cuckoo bees have also lost the pollen-collecting structures (scopae) that other bees use—anatomical evidence of evolutionary commitment to parasitism. They cannot return to honest foraging even if hosts disappeared.

Cuckoo bees typically attack solitary bee hosts rather than social colonies, where defenses would overwhelm individual parasites. The strategy works because solitary bees invest heavily in each offspring but have limited nest defense. Each parasitized nest represents massive lost investment for the host. The business parallel illuminates platform parasitism: entities that exploit others' infrastructure and customer acquisition investments without contributing to system maintenance. App cloners, content scrapers, and counterfeit sellers follow cuckoo bee logic—leveraging others' investments while bearing none of the development costs. Like cuckoo bees, they thrive only while hosts remain productive enough to parasitize.