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Video: Bees Bang Heads 350 Times Per Second

By R. Siva Kumar | Update Date: Dec 17, 2015 11:02 AM EST

A new discovery on bees shows that bees that can bang their heads at a speed of 350 times a second in order to spread pollen.

One Australian blue-banded bee's (Amegilla murrayensis) head banging became the stuff of a rock star's. It was captured on a video by scientists from the University of Adelaid, along with RMIT, Harvard University and University of California, Davis.

The bee bangs its head into the flower in order to make more pollen escape into the air, spending less time on every bloom. It is a technique of cross-pollination that helped to give researchers an insight into how it happens and offers a better technique for crop pollination.

Watch it grip the flower with its legs, even as it vibrates its thorax muscles, enabling them to go on to its head, or its anther, next moving on to a huge "head banging feat"---just like a tantrum.

"We were absolutely surprised. We were so buried in the science of it, we never thought about something like this. This is something totally new," Katja Hogendoorn from the School of Agriculture, Food and Wine of the University of Adelaide said, according to Science Daily.

"Our earlier research has shown that blue-banded bees are effective pollinators of greenhouse tomatoes," Hogendoorn added. "This new finding suggests that blue-banded bees could also be very efficient pollinators - needing fewer bees per hectare."

YouTube/Callin Switzer 

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