In a world where you can have hot food delivered to you within minutes even if you're in the middle of the wilderness, many of you probably believe that there are no more hunter-gatherers left. You would be wrong. There are still some places where buying a meal simply isn't an option. Fortunately, there are also still badasses who plunge through ice caverns, stare down lions and pop live testicles between their teeth just to survive another season.

6 The Nepalese Dangle from Cliffs for Honey

The Bee Photographer â€“ Eric Tourneret

Continue Reading Below Advertisement

Endangering oneself for the sake of honey is a task normally left to stuffed bears, but there are people from isolated villages in Nepal who routinely scale towering cliff faces to pilfer the homes of millions of bees for the sweet golden reward. The tremendous risk involved is unspoken, but understood by every villager (sort of like Grandma's racism at Thanksgiving), as is evidenced by the fact that many of the cliffs are named after people who fell to their deaths while trying to collect honey.

The Bee Photographer â€“ Eric Tourneret

For example, this one is named "Tensu the Drunk."

Continue Reading Below Advertisement

The gathering is done by highly coordinated teams of insect-robbing specialists, each tasked with a specific duty, sort of like if the A-Team recruited a bunch of sugar-thieving cereal mascots to steal breakfast from withholding children. Presumably each group is prepped with a sobering viewing of Macaulay Culkin's bee sting death scene in My Girl before going out into the field.

Once at the cliff, the first step is pissing off hundreds of thousands of bees by igniting a massive blaze at its base. The logic here is to get all of the bees out of the hive -- if the bees are swirling around in a homicidal frenzy, they will sting the shit out of everyone, as opposed to just converging on whoever climbs up to take the honey and annihilating him. While the fire is being started, another squad lowers a ladder laden with buckets and ropes from the top of the cliff. Once it is in place, a team member called the guru carries two long bamboo poles up the ladder to stick his face into a one-ton gigafuck explosion of angry bees.

The Bee Photographer â€“ Eric Tourneret

"Oh God, I think the EpiPen fell out of my pocket."

Continue Reading Below Advertisement

The guru ties himself to the ladder with one of the ropes and begins to blindly smash the poles into the beehive, following instructions being shouted at him from both above and below. The goal is to dislodge pieces of honeycomb into the buckets, which are then hoisted up by the team at the top of the cliff. The team at the bottom is responsible for moving the ladder around to reposition the guru as needed. Keep in mind that all of this is done via coordinated instructo-screams between the two teams -- the hurricane of furious bees keeps anyone from seeing what the hell they are doing for themselves.