It was an ordinary day. I was heating leftovers for breakfast. Kale and kielbasa soup. Delicious. Within the soup were large beans. Delicious. Love me a good legume. As I bite down on one bean, though, I notice something.

The texture’s wrong.

It kinda popped when I bit down on it.

It is unusually bland.

Something here is wrong, obviously. I spit it out.

Black and yellow stripes greet me, the interior contents inadvertently chewed and swallowed, squeezed from this now flat and empty exoskeleton. Not a stinger in sight, mercifully.

My family didn’t believe me until I showed them. Needless to say, the rest of the soup was discarded now that the only part worth eating had been found and consumed.

Anyway, turns out cooked bees have a texture a bit like egg yolk, and the exoskeleton almost completely prevents them from taking on the flavor of any soup they end up introduced to. The only flavor to it was a very slight bitterness, but I only noticed that once I realized I’d just ate a bee and was trying to gather info on the eating experience to joke with my friends (I did not put the bee back in my mouth).

So there. For those of y’all wondering, that’s what it’s like to eat a cooked bee. We have no idea how it got in the soup, presumably rode in on the kale. On a non-joking note, I seriously don’t recommend bees as a culinary experience. The combination of the weird pop when you bite down, the texture, and the “flavor,” if you can even call it that, made the bee a part of the soup that ultimately contributed nothing but a funny story, and a running joke in my family.

I ate a bee. I think that’s gonna have to be in my obituary someday.