How do Honeybees Consume Nectar? By Sucking and Not Just Dipping Their Tongues, Scientists Discover

Bee’s tongue is adapted perfectly to lapping syrupy nectars
For over 100 years, scientists have known how honeybees drink nectar. They lap it up. They don’t lap like cats or dogs, videos of our Honey Bees drinking habits have been one of the great rewards of high-speed video. Dipping their hairy tongues rapidly in and out of syrupy nectar to draw it up into their mouth. Scientists have been convinced that this is the only way they drink nectar. They have now discovered bees will also suck nectar, which is more efficient when the sugar content is lower and the nectar is less viscous. A high-speed video of bees drinking a nectar substitute in a lab shows that not only do honey bees have this ability, but they can also change their drinking mode in an instant.

Jianing Wu, an engineering and biophysics specialist, at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China, and the senior researcher on the experiment, said that while honey bees excel at feeding on highly concentrated nectar, “we find that they can also flexibly switch the feeding strategy from lapping to suction”. He and his colleagues reported the results on Wednesday in the journal Biology Letters.

Alejandro Rico-Guevara, who runs the Behavioral Eco Physics Lab at the University of Washington, Seattle, and studies nectar-feeding in birds, also worked on the project. He said “this flexibility in nectar-drinking behavior means that although bees prefer the more syrupy nectars, they can efficiently feed on flowers whose nectar is more watery. “This has implications at many different scales, from pollination, for our food, all the way to the role they have in natural ecosystems,”  (New York Times)

As a beekeeper, I find this study to be fascinating and I understand how our Honey Bees, our Pollinators are so efficient and how they are adapting to climate change, and the difference in our flowers in producing nectar and flowering to their fullest size, color and their purest of nectars. 

Our Pollinators, Honey Bees, Bumble Bees, are one of the most important species in our ecosystem in keeping us alive, as well as our planet!