This is apparently my day to rag on Chuck Shepherd.

In today’s News of the Weird, Chuck writes, “An ovipositor is the organ that inserts or receives an egg (especially from parasites like bees — and that thing in “Alien”).”

Bees are not parasites! They lay their eggs in various structures they make, whether hives, holes in the ground, or holes drilled in wood.

OK, there are a very few bees that are nest parasites, but even they lay their eggs in holes in the ground, not in other organisms as Chuck implies.

(Receives? I’m not familiar with any usage of the term “ovipositor” for an organ that receives eggs.)

I’m pretty sure he was thinking of the various wasps that paralyze a living organism, then lay eggs on/in it, or the wasps that use the ovipositor to insert their eggs into plants, but bees and wasps can’t just be confused like that!

I like Chuck’s column, please don’t take this as a recommendation to avoid. He just knows (apparently) not very much about entomology.