The Nappy Cat Chronicles

If the strength of that sweet tooth of your’s hasn’t provided enough indication, our desire for sweets is hardwired:

Monkeys and ape spend their days in the forest searching for ripe fruit. They have been selected to prefer sweet, ripe fruit over unripe, bitter fruit because it has higher sugar content and supplies more ready energy. Ripe fruit also has more water, which can be hard to find high in the canopy.

So it makes sense for primates, including us, to have a highly developed palate for sweet things. And we primates have extended that preference beyond mere fruit.

In the 1990s, William McGrew, now at Cambridge University, reported that chimpanzees used sticks to dip into beehives and extract honey.

And they suffer to get it. Chimps break into a hive with their fingers, ignoring the buzz of angry bees and the sting of those that bite, and get down to business like Winnie-the-Pooh with his hand in the honey jar.

Researchers have also discovered that honey dipping is a multi-cultural chimpanzee behavior; at different sites across Africa, chimps use different sort of tools to pull out the sweet stuff.