没有双手，蜜蜂也有『左撇子』或『右撇子』

2018-11-30

疯狂英语·新读写 2018年10期

精彩导读

蜜蜂在觅食过程中，往往要经过很多障碍物；同时，蜜蜂的飞行也有一定的方向性。

Honeybees，have a difficult task.They have to find food.Then they have to return to the hive (蜂箱)to tell their partners where to find it.The bees have to flyback and forthbetween the hive and their food,over and over again.And they need todeal withwhatever obstacles(障碍物)lie along their flight paths.

“Honeybees face a lot of challenges in choosing efficient searching routes through dense(稠密的)environment.And we basically want to study how they choose effective routes—the safest and least energy-expending routes.”

Marielle Ong,a researcher at the University of Queensland in Australia.To track the insects’flying routes,she and her teamset uptiny obstacle courses for more than a hundred honeybees.Along the way,the bees were forced to fly through one or the other of two openings of different sizes.And as a group,the bees usually flew through the wider opening,whichmakes sense.Less chances of closing their tiny bee bodies into a wall.

But things got more interesting when Ong looked at the decisions made by individual bees,one by one.

“We found that 55 percent had no biases(偏见),and the rest of the 45 percent was a split between left-handed bees and right-handed bees.”

In other words,some honeybees have a sense of direction.They obviously don’t have hands,but let’s say they’re either right-handed or left-handed.So,for example,a right-handed bee wouldprefer to gothrough the narrow right-side opening in the obstacle than go through the left-side hole,even though it was larger and safer.Sometimes,the handed bees would even land and walk through the smaller opening,just so they could use their preferred side.

These biases apparently help the members of large swarms(蜂群)navigate through a complex environment without crashing into each other.If all bees were right handed,it would take a long time for the entire group to pass through a small opening,such as a hive entrance.Butby havinga range of side biases,the entire swarm can move more quickly when it meet with an obstacle.

Ong thinks that one day engineers could apply this finding.They could design robotic male bee swarms to negotiate(协商)obstacles more efficiently.They could even program self-driving cars to operate less like a chaotic assortment of humans and more like an orderly group of honeybees.