BERKELEY, Calif., April 17 (UPI) -- U.S. scientists confirmed that orchid bees with long tongues gather nectar more slowly than bees with shorter tongues.
Orchid bees use their extraordinarily long tongues to drink nectar from the deep, tropical flowers only they can access. Researchers have suspected that kind of exclusive access came with a mechanical cost since it is difficult to suck thick, viscous nectars through a long straw.
Now, Brendan Borrell and colleagues at the University of California-Berkeley confirmed that prediction for the first time.
Borrell spent three years measuring feeding rates of bees he collected in forests across Costa Rica and Panama. He found the smallest bees sometimes had the longest tongues and the largest bees sometimes had the shortest tongues. But after taking into account variation in body size, he found long tongues impose a mechanical cost on orchid bees, since they are sacrificing speed for exclusive access to certain flowers.
The research is reported in the May issue of The American Naturalist.
