News Physics

Queen bumblebees are poor foragers thanks to sparse tongue hair

Dense, fine hairs on the tongues of bumblebees allow them to pick up nectar with each slurp

Two bumblebees drink liquid out of a shallow dish.

A bumblebee worker (left) and a queen (right) drink a sugar solution in a laboratory. The larger queens are less efficient foragers, due to sparser hair on their tongues.

Zexiang Huang, Shumeng Wu, Qinglin Wu

By Emily Conover

This is a human-written story voiced by AI.