Answer: Nectar

If you spend your summers cursing and swatting away mosquitoes trying to feast on every inch of your exposed skin, know that you’re cursing the females of the mosquito world. In the species of mosquitoes that feed on mammalian blood (not all mosquitoes, you might be surprised to learn, are blood sucking), only the females prey on humans, and they only do so during a small period of time during their mating cycle when they require nutrients from our blood to produce eggs.

In fact, not only does the male mosquito not drink blood, he has an outright passive approach to feeding that puts him more on par with hummingbirds and bees. The male mosquitoes in the blood-sucking mosquito species do not partake of blood with their vampire-like female counterparts, they instead feed on plant nectar (and sometimes other sources of sugar) to sustain themselves.