Hummingbirds consume about half their body weight in sugar every day.

Hummingbirds eats about half of its body weight in sugar daily and may have a meal up to every ten minutes.

Hummingbirds eats about half of its body weight in sugar daily and may have a meal up to every ten minutes.Hummingbirds are the smallest species native to America - the bee hummingbird of Cuba weighs only 1.95 grams. These birds have the highest mass-specific metabolic rate of any homeothermic animal, with the fastest heartbeat of any bird species, scientific literature suggests. Hummingbirds require a high amount of energy to flap their wings 50 times or more per second in order to maintain hovering flight, reported Science Daily. High sugar levels in their blood help them accomplish this as energy is not spent in first converting sugar into fat.

Kenneth C. Welch Jr. at the University of Toronto, Scarborough who has studied the metabolisms of hummingbirds for more than a decade told The New York Times that during foraging, hummingbirds exclusively burn sugar that they would have consumed in the last 30 minutes to an hour. He explained that if a hummingbird were to be scaled up to adult human size, it would need an amount of sugar equivalent to that in a Coca-Cola can per minute.

As per estimates published by the School of Life Sciences at the Arizona State University, a hummingbird eats about half of its body weight in sugar daily and may have a meal up to every ten minutes