The blue-banded bee has a brute-force approach to getting pollen out of a flower: it uses its head as a pneumatic drill
When it comes to feeding, the Australian blue-banded bee acts like a fan of thrash metal.
While a North American common eastern bumblebee will shake pollen from a flower using its mandibles and wing muscles, an Australian blue-banded bee will simply bash a flower with its head up to 350 times a second.
Watch the video below to see it in action.
Callin Switzer from Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US and his colleagues obtained this slow-motion footage, which captures the bee's hands-free approach for the first time. The findings have been published in the journal Arthropod-Plant Interactions.
The teams say the discovery could lead to advances in a range of areas, from improved crop pollination to better understanding muscular stress and even the development of miniature flying robots.
Bumblebees are commonly used around the world to commercially pollinate tomato plants. However, as there are no bumblebees on the Australian mainland, local greenhouse tomatoes have to be pollinated mechanically.
The researchers showed that the Australian bees vibrate the flower at a higher frequency than overseas bees and spend less time per flower. That suggests blue-banded bees could be efficient pollinators.