A perennially fascinating question to scientists is how animals get liquids into their faces without cups, straws or hands. In recent years they've cracked the puzzle in dogs and cats, two creatures that often do their noisy drinking near us. Bees, too, sip nectar in plain sight of humans. But their methods are more subtle and mysterious. Shaoze Yan, a mechanical engineering professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, and his colleagues took a very close look at Italian honeybees to see how they drink nectar. The researchers combined high-speed photography with images from a scanning electron microscope, which revealed the bees' intricately built mouthparts.
The honeybee's tongue, called a glossa, is about 2.5 millimeters long in this species. The authors note that up close, it "resembles a mop." That's because the glossa is covered in long hairs. When the bee is ready to drink nectar from a flower, the ...
