Bee hummingbird
Mellisuga helenae
— Where the name comes from
Mellisuga is “honey-sucker”, from mel and sugere. Helenae dedicates the species to a woman named Helena whose identity the sources do not agree on: the naturalist who described it in Cuba in 1850 never set it down, and the name has stayed there, dedicated to somebody nobody can now name. In Cuban Spanish it is the zunzuncito, from the hum.
— Facts
- Group
- Birds · Aves
- Order
- Hummingbirds and swifts
- Habitat
- Forest, edges, gardens and coastal scrub of Cuba
- Range
- Cuba and the Isla de la Juventud
- Size
- 5–6 cm, 1.6–2 g
- Diet
- Nectar, minute insects and spiders
- Lifespan
- 7 years in the wild
— Characteristics
- 01
It is the smallest bird in the world: it weighs less than two paper clips.
- 02
The nest is the size of half a walnut and the eggs the size of coffee beans.
- 03
It beats its wings eighty times a second, and the displaying male up to two hundred.
— What sets it apart
Its heart reaches twelve hundred beats a minute and its body temperature forty degrees: the fastest metabolism of any warm-blooded animal, and to sustain it the bird must visit around fifteen hundred flowers a day. At night, when feeding is impossible, it could not survive: so it shuts nearly everything down, lets its temperature fall by twenty degrees and enters a torpor it comes out of at dawn, shivering itself warm. Every evening, for this animal, is a small reversible death.
