墨尔本PTE素材库——Bees Rank Pollen by Taste

墨尔本PTE素材库——Bees Rank Pollen by Taste

中文批注

蜜蜂究竟是怎么挑选有甜味的花粉，避开苦味的花粉的呢~这就是这篇podcast要讨论的内容。实验证明，蜜蜂不仅仅品尝花蜜，也会品尝花粉的味道，对于某些“难吃”花粉，更有伪装术，假如没有吃到量的话，花粉都会很tasteful的.这篇文章内容分析，生词难词也不多，各个目标分数段的同学，都可以尝试一下哦！

澳大利亚语言学院整理的墨尔本PTE素材库，旨在帮助各位PTE考生整理一些可以用作PTE考试题型练习的素材，可以帮助大家提升dictation、re-tell lecture、Summarize  spoken text 等等题型的能力哦！PTE市面上的素材并不多，练习的题目也不多，所以AIL整理的这些PTE素材库，真的是帮助非常大的哦！

【Key vocabulary】

Discerning adj. 有辨识能力的

Bombard vt. 轰击

Bumblebee n. 大黄蜂

Nectar n. 花粉

Pollination n. 授粉

Concentration n. 浓度

Aficionado n. 狂热爱好者

Savour n. 滋味， vt. 具有…的特点

Calibrate vt. 校正，调整

Full Transcript

The discerning insects returned to flowers with sweetened pollen, but avoided revisiting flowers with bitter pollen. Christopher Intagliata reports.

Walk through Times Square—you’re bombarded with advertising. And it turns out, a bumblebee might have a similar feeling, buzzing through a field of flowers. “So these flowers are these billboards, they’re advertising a good, this delicious nectar reward, and bees are very picky shoppers.” Anne Leonard, a pollination biologist at the University of Nevada, Reno.

She describes a flower field as a sort of pollination marketplace. And one way bees choose where to visit? “Bees are nectar experts. They are really good at assessing even really small differences in the sugar concentration of nectar.” They also scope out flower shape and size, colour and scent. And now Leonard and her colleagues have discovered that bumblebees are pollen aficionados, too.

They found that out by lacing batches of cherry pollen with either table sugar or bitter quinine. And to display the pollen to bees, “We got really into it—we started 3-D printing flowers in our lab.” And for the anther—the male flower part, which presents the pollen—pipe cleaners. “So we bought out Michael’s craft store supplies of these pipe cleaners and used them in our experiments.”

Turns out bees would return again and again to the same colour flower that dispensed sweet pollen, and spend more time collecting there. But when confronted with the bitter pollen? They sought a different coloured flower for their very next stop. All of which suggests that, in addition to savouring nectar, bees taste pollen too—and judge flowers by it. The results are in the journal Biology Letters. [Felicity Muth, Jacob S. Francis and Anne S. Leonard, Bees use the taste of pollen to determine which flowers to visit]

The finding means that plants have to find a happy medium: “So can you make your pollen attractive enough that the bees will collect it, but distasteful enough that they won’t collect too much of it?” And that balancing act, of carefully calibrated chemistry—it’s just one of the many transactions that plays out in the buzzing pollination marketplace. Where the object is to make a sweet profit.

(Source: http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/bees-rank-pollen-by-taste/)