Proboscis
Lexikon
The bee's proboscis is a sucking and licking organ made up of several mouthparts.
The bee's proboscis is a sucking and licking organ made up of several mouthparts. With it the bee takes up nectar from the flower, dabs honeydew from the leaf, and passes food on to other bees. At the tip of the proboscis sit sensory cells for taste.
Proboscis length differs considerably between the castes. The worker has a long proboscis; the queen and drone have a short one, because they do not perform foraging duty. There are also differences between the subspecies. For the Carinthian bee, values of around 6.4 to 6.8 millimeters are given, and for the dark bee, depending on the region of origin, about 5.9 to 6.5 millimeters.
Proboscis length also determines which nectar sources a bee can reach at all. Flowers with long corolla tubes, above all red clover, are pollinated mainly by bumblebees and long-tongued wild bees. With red clover it depends on the variety and corolla tube length whether the honey bee can help out, and the figures on this diverge in the literature.