The animal is a bumblebee, especially a worker of Bombus terrestris. Its glossa is not a smooth drinking straw: under a scanning electron microscope it is a segmented tongue covered with rows of micrometre-scale hairs.
When the bee laps nectar and pulls the glossa back, liquid bridges form between those closely spaced hairs. The curved menisci create capillary (Laplace) pressure that holds nectar in the hairy sleeve; the surrounding mouthparts then move that captured liquid into the mouth. Small workers have relatively dense, closely spaced hairs, so their tiny tongues retain nectar surprisingly well and work over different nectar viscosities. Larger queens have longer but more widely spaced, more porous tongue hairs and actually capture less nectar relative to tongue capacity.
So the apparent paradox is that being smaller does not prevent efficient feeding—the microscopic hair spacing makes the worker a better nectar collector. This mechanism was demonstrated with electron microscopy and high-speed feeding video: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12818393/
The animal is a bumblebee, especially a worker of Bombus terrestris. Its glossa is not a smooth drinking straw: under a scanning electron microscope it is a segmented tongue covered with rows of micrometre-scale hairs.
When the bee laps nectar and pulls the glossa back, liquid bridges form between those closely spaced hairs. The curved menisci create capillary (Laplace) pressure that holds nectar in the hairy sleeve; the surrounding mouthparts then move that captured liquid into the mouth. Small workers have relatively dense, closely spaced hairs, so their tiny tongues retain nectar surprisingly well and work over different nectar viscosities. Larger queens have longer but more widely spaced, more porous tongue hairs and actually capture less nectar relative to tongue capacity.
So the apparent paradox is that being smaller does not prevent efficient feeding—the microscopic hair spacing makes the worker a better nectar collector. This mechanism was demonstrated with electron microscopy and high-speed feeding video: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12818393/