Hummingbirds, among the smallest birds on the planet, flap their wings at as much as 80 beats a second. And scientists have been studying how they get enough nectar to satisfy that energy demand.

New research shows they use a combination of behaviours to extract nectar from flowers: “lapping” with specialised tongues and “sucking” by rapidly and simultaneously opening and shutting different parts of their bills.

Often, animals use one approach or the other when drinking. Hummingbirds are a rare example of using both.

“Most hummingbirds drink while they’re hovering mid-flight,” says Alejandro Rico-Guevara, an assistant professor of biology at the University of Washington in the US and first author of the study in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.

“Energetically, that is very expensive. Flying straight at commuting speeds uses up less energy than hovering to drink.

“So, hummingbirds are trying to minimise energy and drink as fast as they can, all from these hard-to-reach spaces, which requires special adaptations for speed and efficiency.

“It makes sense that they would have to use both.”

To understand the intricate bill movements that underlie drinking in hummingbirds, the team collected high-speed video footage of individuals from 6 different species as they fed and combined this with data from micro-CT scans of hummingbird specimens.

“We already knew that hummingbird bills have some flexibility, for example bending their lower bill while catching insects,” says Rico-Guevara.

“But now we know that the bill plays this very active and essential role in drawing up nectar that the tongue collects.”

Their findings revealed that a hummingbird opens just the tip of its bill to extend its tongue. After it brings in the nectar, the bill tip closes.

To draw the nectar up, the hummingbird keeps its bill’s midsection tightly shut while opening the base very slightly.

These behaviours then repeat again for a new cycle, which many hummingbird species can do 10-15 times per second.