The feeding mechanisms of animals constrain the spectrum of resources that they can exploit profitably. For floral nectar eaters, both corolla depth and nectar properties have marked influence on foraging choices. We report the multiple strategies used by honey bees to efficiently extract nectar at the range of sugar concentrations and corolla depths they face in nature. Honey bees can collect nectar by dipping their hairy tongues or capillary loading when lapping it, or they can attach the tongue to the wall of long corollas and directly suck the nectar along the tongue sides. The honey bee feeding apparatus is unveiled as a multifunctional tool that can switch between lapping and sucking nectar according to the instantaneous ingesting efficiency, which is determined by the interplay of nectar–mouth distance and sugar concentration. These versatile feeding mechanisms allow honey bees to extract nectar efficiently from a wider range of floral resources than previously appreciated and endow them with remarkable adaptability to diverse foraging environments.

No abstract

The interaction between bee pollinators and flowering plants lays the foundation of biodiversity and food production for human livelihoods, with three out of four crops worldwide relying on this interaction. The ongoing success of this mutualism is pow-ered by the bilateral and potentially dueling demands of food procurement for polli-nators and sexual reproduction for plants. However, the underlying mechanisms of the mutualism, which must simultaneously fulfil the requirements from both sides, remain unexplored. Here we establish a biomechanical framework that combines la-boratory tests and mathematical models to investigate the relationship between bees and plants, using the feeding speed of bees and the nectar sugar concentration of flowers as the core factors. We find that both the optimal frequency of a bee dipping nectar and the nectar sugar concentration are delicately balanced over narrow ranges to simultaneously satisfy demands of both parties of the mutualism. Human activities and climate change can perturb this balanced interaction, which would be detri-mental to this critical pollination system essential to staple crops around the world.

The water snail (Pomacea canaliculata) is featured in both broad dietary scope and high feeding rate, possibly making it one of the most successful mollusc invaders globally. The water snail...