题型：阅读理解 题类：常考题 难易度：普通
内蒙古赤峰二中2018-2019学年高二下学期英语第二次月考试卷
Earlier this month a study showed that bees can teach themselves to play football. They can learn by watching and, rather than copy what they have seen, change it to make it better. Bees also have a clever trick for helping their friends find lunch. New research shows that bees leave smelly little footprints on flowers that help them know what flowers they and their family members have recently visited.
The discovery was made by scientists from University of Bristol who report these smelly footprints help bees distinguish between their own scent(气味), the scent of a relative and the scent of a stranger. And by using this ability, bees can improve their success at finding good sources of a food and avoid flowers that have already been visited and mined of nutrients.
The Bristol team performed three separate experiments with bumblebees(大黄蜂)in which they were repeatedly exposed to rewarding and unrewarding flowers at the same time that had footprints from different bees attached to them. Each flower type either carried scent -marks from bumblebees of differing relatedness or were unmarked. The marks were either the bee's own marks, sisters from their nest, or strangers from another nest.
The study shows that not only can bumblebees tell the marks of their own nest mates from strangers, but they can also discriminate between the smell of their own footprints and those of their nest mate sisters, which could help them to remember which flowers they have visited recently. But it doesn't explain how they use that in the wild. They may detect the footprints of their friends and keep moving on, since that flower may be tapped out. Or they may smell a bit of familiar foot smell and dive in, seeing it as a marker that nectar(花蜜)is present.
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