This recipe is adapted from the fantastic Girl Meets Bug blog. A connoisseur of all things insect, Daniella Martin’s website is a great source of information and ideas for wannabe entomophagists.

For instructions on how to prepare bee larvae got fresh from the hive, see here.

Everyone has their own secrets with a BLT...

Bee larvae, Martin insists, taste ‘very much like bacon’ (why is it always bacon?) – and so she makes them into a ‘Bee-LT Sandwich’. She also includes some helpful information on the ethics of eating bees – stick to drone larvae, who do not pollinate and are often discarded anyway, as we explain elsewhere.

She doesn’t specify how many bee larvae to use, so let’s go with a ‘handful’. Sautee these in a teaspoon of butter, along with a little bit of salt and ¼ tsp of honey, until golden brown.

Photo: Girl Meets Bug

Remove the pan from the heat and add in enough egg white to cover the larvae and then add this back into the butter. At this point shape it into a burger shape and cook for a minute until it’s firm

Then make your sandwich! Martin suggests mayonnaise on toasted bread with lettuce and tomato, but everyone has their own secrets with a BLT.

Ingredients:

• Handful of bee larvae
• 1 egg white
• 1 tsp butter
• ¼ tsp honey
• 1 tomato
• 1 leaf lettuce
• 2 slices bread
• 1 tbsp mayonnaise
• 1 pinch salt

Copyright Daniella Martin, author of Edible: An Adventure into the World of Eating Insects and the Last Great Hope to Save the Planet.

Photo: Nordic Food Lab, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0