雅思听力section 4真题：蜜蜂的交流_雅思英语听力

雅思听力section 4真题：蜜蜂的交流

　　A sister bee observing this performance somehow remembers the size of the angle between the sun and the food indicated by the dancing bee. She flies out of the hive, makes a quick calculation of the position of the sun, and zips away at the same angle.

　　Bees have compound eyes made of almost 6,000 tiny lenses covering the openings of equally tiny tubes. Each tube contains eight light receptors that look like toothbrushes with the bristles facing each other at the lens end of the tube; the handle is the nerve going to the brane. The tubes located at the top of the bees eye contain toothbrushes that specialize in detecting polarized ultraviolet light. Beginning at the back of the bees compound eye and continuing around to the front, these specialized photoreceptors in each tube are arranged in a pattern that matches the direction of polarized sunlight.

　　Polarization results when the atmosphere scatters incoming sunlight and restricts the lights electrical field to a certain direction. When polarized sunlight enters a bees eye, it stimulates the bristles, which in turn stimulate the photoreceptor handles that send a message to the bees brain. Polarized sunlight with an electrical field direction that matches the direction of the bristles stimulates the bees eye more than any other type of light.

　　In a complicated series of experiments described in the Sept. 11 NATURE, Rossel and Wehner showed that a bee flies in a circle until the special receptors in her eye detect the maximum stimulation from polarized light. The map in her eye tells her that, in this position, she is facing directly away from the sun. Remembering the orientation of her sister bees waggle dance back at the hive, the bee veers off at the same angle to make a beeline for lunch.