Bee Hummingbird

Fascinating facts about the Bee Hummingbird

• At 5 centimetres long and 1.6 grams, the bee hummingbird weighs less than a penny — yet it has a heart that beats 500 times per second when at rest and up to 1,260 times per second during courtship dives. To sustain this metabolism, it must visit 1,500 flowers every single day, or starve within hours of fasting. It burns through its body weight in sugar every two days.
• Only the male bee hummingbird makes a sound that can be heard from 100 metres away — not with its vocal cords, but by diving nearly vertically at speeds up to 60 km/h, then yanking its tail feathers outward with such force they vibrate like a tuning fork. The sound is a shriek that announces he owns this territory. Females arrive mute.
• A bee hummingbird can fly backwards, upside down, and hover motionless by rotating its wings in a figure-eight pattern — each wing beat takes just 20 milliseconds, meaning its wings blur into invisibility to the human eye. It can switch from hovering to a 100 km/h forward sprint in a single wingbeat, the closest any animal comes to helicopter flight.
• The bee hummingbird nests in a cup the size of a shot glass, woven from spider silk and plant down — so delicate you could fit it in your palm. The mother lays two eggs smaller than coffee beans. When insects become scarce during storms, the chick enters torpor, dropping its heart rate from 500 to just 50 beats per minute to survive on virtually no fuel for up to 10 hours.
• Cuba's bee hummingbird survives nowhere else on Earth except the island and the nearby Isle of Youth — a total habitat smaller than 20,000 square kilometres. Deforestation, invasive species, and hurricane damage threaten the flowers it depends on, making it one of the world's most range-restricted birds. Climate change is shifting when flowers bloom, and the hummingbirds cannot shift fast enough.

At a glance

About the Bee Hummingbird

In the sun-drenched gardens of Cuba, a fleck of iridescent green darts through the air, its wings a mesmerizing blur as the Bee Hummingbird flits from flower to flower, sipping nectar with an insatiable hunger. With a metabolism that demands constant fuel, this tiny avian dynamo is a whirlwind of energy, its bright plumage glimmering like a shard of stained glass as it hovers, pauses, and dashes through its domain with an irresistible allure. As it dances on the breeze, its very existence seems a defiance of gravity, a testament to the boundless wonder that can be found in the smallest of creatures.

Discover more wildlife