Bees Suck (Not Lick) Their Honey
Of course bees rock, but did you know they suck, too? They suck their nectar! For years the world of science believed bees simply dipped their tongues in and out of nectar to get their fill, but recently scientists discovered the action is more of a sucking nature and not lapping it up like a dog.
A bee’s tongue has adapted precisely to capture syrupy nectars. One version of getting nectar has bees dipping their hairy tongues rapidly in and out of pooled nectar to draw it up into their mouths. A new discovery shows bees can also suck nectar.
Sucking nectar is more efficient when the sugar content of the nectar is lower and nectar itself is less viscous. A high speed video of bees drinking a nectar substitute in a lab shows that not only do honeybees have this unexpected ability, they can go back and forth from one drinking mode to another.
David Hu, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, who supervised some of this early research said, "...Honeybee tongues are like a Swiss army knife, able to efficiently drink many types of nectar." Like that tool, honeybees can adjust the method of drawing nectar depending on the type of nectar they encounter.
Alejandro Rico-Guevara, who runs the Behavioural Ecophysics Lab at the University of Washington, Seattle, and studies nectar feeding in birds, also worked on the project and found a fascinating discovery: bees are so sensitive to the viscosity of the nectar that they switch at the exact point you would expect, to get the best reward for the energy invested.
Bees are so incredible!
The honeybee tongue is adapted perfectly to lapping syrupy nectars. Once the tongue is dipped into thick nectars, about 10,000 bristles covering the tongue erect simultaneously at a certain angle for trapping the nectar. The bee then pulls its tongue back into its proboscis, which is really a part of its mouth, and a pumping mechanism in the head sucks the nectar off the tongue.
When the viscosity changes so that the nectar is less thick, the bees let their tongues stay in the nectar and suck it up into their mouths, apparently using the same pumping mechanism.
Bees are so versatile and can adapt to be the most efficient forager in the world.