A Bee's Eye View

Foggy Sunrise over Vientiane...I do hope you've had your breakfast before you read this...

Breakfasting on the oddest of substances, bee larvae in the comb. I can't explain the complicated mechanism whereby I somehow fooled myself into eating it the first time (there was another traveler nearby, so perhaps the 'dare' element was the active ingredient)

The taste is easier to describe: it is a milky liquid, tinged with salt, which I believe the Lao add for flavor in the form of soya sauce. The sensation of the milk flooding your mouth is not unpleasant, however it is so difficult to keep your mind from focusing on the source of that milk; the fact that it comes from inside of the hex cells of the bee is enough to make most people gag.

But once you have eaten your first 'larvaecomb', the hardest part is over - then technique begins to take over...you can tear each litle cell off of the whole bit by bit, it becomes the sort of food you can pick at while making conversation with a friend (the perfect party food)-and before you know it, you are tearing off the very last little honeycomb cell.

This is not the only strange and exotic food I encountered in the marketplace; I also found people eating ant eggs mixed with other food. As you might suspect, ant eggs look like little grains of rice, only slightly more rubbery and juicy...I tried a few of them, but wasn't able to detect a taste on such a small quantity.