Honey Bees Remember Happy and Sad Times

While the brains of honey bees are tiny, the insects are capable of some surprisingly advanced thinking. A study published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society has now cast new     1     on the insect’s cognitive abilities.

A team of researchers from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign found that honey bees can remember positive and negative     2     — such as taking care of their young or fending off an enemy. These memories are stored in specific areas of their brains, according to how good or bad they are.

Scientists have long known that vertebrates — animals with tail bones — like ourselves are capable of sorting memories of pleasure and pain in     3     brain areas such as this. However, this has never been documented before in the minds of bees.

“We found that bees     4     different parts of their brain to processing social information that is either negative or positive,” Gene Robinson, an author of the study, told Newsweek. This discovery is     5    given how small their brains are; we did not expect such spatial separation of social information of different valence. Valence is a term used in psychology when discussing emotions to refer to the intrinsic (内在的) positivity or negativity of an event, object, or situation.

In the study, the researchers looked at regions of the honey bee brain that’s     6     in other invertebrates (非脊柱动物), referred to as “mushroom bodies,” which are associated with sensory processing, learning and memory. They     7     the expressions of genes following aggressive or collaborative social interactions, demonstrating that different parts of the these mushroom bodies were specially activated depending on the valence of the interaction — in other words, whether the interaction was harmful or     8    .

“These findings can help us better understand ‘biological embedding (嵌入),’ or how social information ‘gets under skin’ to affect the behavior,’ he said. “Biological embedding is an important issue in understanding health and     9     in humans.”

Furthermore, because the type of memory that the researchers documented is     10     in the brains of vertebrates, the latest findings demonstrated a link between vertebrate and invertebrate cognition despite the two animal groups diverging (分岔) in evolutionary terms around 600 million years ago.

Ball- Rolling Bumble Bees Just Wanna Have Fun

Playtime isn’ t just for children. Lab- kept bumble bees roll small wooden balls around for no

    1     purpose other than fun, a new study reveals. It supports evidence that bees experience pleasure,    2     the importance of protecting them in the wild and treating them well in their natural habitats.

“It is super cool,” says Elizabeth Tibbetts, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Michigan. “We usually think about insects as being so different that they lack complex behaviors.” But not everyone is convinced the behavior is in fact play.

Lars Chittka, a behavioral ecologist at Queen Mary University of London, and his colleagues    3     came across the new evidence. The team was studying how bumble bees learn complex behaviors from their comrades by training the insects to move wooden balls to specific locations. If a bee moved a ball to the right place, it got a sugary     4    . The researchers noticed that some bees moved the balls even when no reward was offered. They just seemed to like going back to them and playing around with them and rolling them all over the place. The careful design of the experiments has convinced him the bees are indeed     5     in play.

Because play implies a capacity to experience emotions, documenting it in insects could have    6     implications. Insects are     7     being raised for animal feed, and there are no regulations governing their welfare. Honey bees are also known to become stressed and more     8     to disease and bee communities collapse when industrialized beekeepers transport them long distances on trucks to     9     and vast fields without diverse flowers nearby, Chittka says. The researchers hope their findings might also     10     greater fellow feeling for — and protection of — wild insects.

【推荐3】Directions: Fill in each blank with a proper word chosen from the box. Each word can be used only once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

One of the British royal traditions is that the king or queen can     1     ownership of any unmarked mute swan in open water in Britain. For many years, this tradition was     2     with Queen Elizabeth II. Every summer, the swans on the River Thames would be counted for Her Majesty. Now, with Britain having King Charles III on the throne, this centuries-old tradition known as the Swan Upping will continue to be     3     over five days during the third week of every July.

Several years ago, when I was living in London, I went along to     4     the tradition for myself. It was a completely enjoyable experience. School kids and elderly watchers gathered ahead of the day’s launch in Marlow (马洛，一个英国城镇) to meet the Royal Swan Marker — Queen Elizabeth II’s     5     in her absence — David Barber, and other Swan Uppers, or catchers.

The Uppers themselves are a mix of old boys and younger men-all dressed in uniforms. They paddle their way upriver in a fleet of wooden boats, shiny with gold detailing. Flags flutter behind them in the     6    .

The small fleet is     7     by an armada (舰队) of watchers. A boatload of journalists is there for the     8    . Hug e passenger boats cruise alongside, trying to get a view of each catch.

Not long after, the traditional call goes out: “All up!” it’s the first catch of the day. The Uppers carefully     9     their boats around the birds, moving closer, before catching and tying them. The young swans are taken ashore and     10    , measured and recorded with rings attached to their legs. And the adult swans are checked against the records. Then the young birds are released with their family, unharmed.

    1     for long hours every day in an office for several years, Nancy Jones felt that she was getting out of shape and decided that she needed to get some exercise. So, instead of going to and from work every day by bus, she started riding a bike because    2     was an enjoyable activity for her. One night she had to work till late and it was foggy outside when she left the office. Her bike did not have a light, so    3     home by bike would be dangerous.     4     (not) to risk having her bike stolen, however, she decided to ride it home anyway. The first few kilometres had plenty of street lights, but     5    onto a side road in the suburbs she found herself in the dark.     6    down, she tried to see in front of her, but it was impossible. Then without warning, her bike hit a rock,     7    her to the ground.     8    to get up, she discovered that her ankle was broken. Unable to stand or walk, she found herself in alarming pain. Fortunately, she was able to call an ambulance with her mobile phone, and they took her to a hospital. However, it was several months before her ankle recovered and she found     9    easy again.     10     a gym membership near her office, Nancy decided that there were other ways of keeping fit.