This mite put you off tea for life.
We’ve always loved the strange facts that come from a night watching QI, until this little bombshell came and broke our tea-drinking little hearts.
We were happily, sitting at our desks, sipping a cup of tea when we came across this little ‘gem’ that mite not be what you were expecting:
Meet the tea mite, Tuckerella japonica, we’ve been imbibing it in our cuppas for about 3000 years. pic.twitter.com/lm6OPYDqeK
— The QI Elves (@qikipedia) January 21, 2015
The Tuckerella Japonica (a cousin of spiders and ticks) lives in hot water, and tags itself to the leaves of a tea plant where it remains. Considering this tiny mite stays invisible on the plant, it is thought that humans have sipped and swallowed by humans since the earliest recorded use of tea.
Talk about a storm in a teacup.
We might just stick to coffee for now…
