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Bees’ bread and butter is flowers—there’s no reason they should be able to distinguish human faces. But they can. Back in 2005, Arian Dyer at Monash University showed that bees could identify people who they associated who with sugary snacks. But could they recognize humans, or did they just see them as weird flowers?
蜜蜂的命根是花朵，它們沒有任何理由非要區分出人類的面孔，但是它們的確可以。早在2005年來自蒙納士大學的Arian Dyer就已指出蜜蜂可以區分出誰是和它們做伴的人誰又是給它們甜點的。但是它們是真的能區分出人類，還是僅把人類當成了一種奇怪的花朵。
Martin Giurfa at France’s Université de Toulouse contacted Dyer to work on that question. First, they drew simple images of facial features—dots for eyes, slashes for nose and mouth. The bees were trained to distinguish between an image with narrower features and one with wider ones.Then the scientists asked if the insects could distinguish facelike features from non-faces? The bees won sugary rewards when they picked out faces as opposed to pictures that just had random dots and dashes.
法國科學家Martin Giurfa和Dyer共同對這一課題進行研究。首先他們用點線畫出簡單的人物頭像：點代表眼睛，斜線代表鼻子和嘴巴；隨后對蜜蜂進行區分不同面孔的訓練?？茖W家們嘗試讓蜜蜂從人臉圖形和隨機點線構成的非人類面孔圖形之間選擇出人類面孔圖形，如果蜜蜂選擇正確將被獎勵甜食。
Finally, the critters faced their ultimate task: to pick out real faces from those that had the features scrambled. And: score. Bees could indeed differentiate faces from non-faces. The study was published in the Journal of Experimental Biology. Scientists hope that the simple bee brain could be a model for automated facial recognition. Which could help in FBI stings.
這些蜜蜂面臨的終極挑戰是從一堆人臉圖形中辨識出真正的人類面孔，它們奇跡般的成功了——看來蜜蜂的確可以區分人臉。這一實驗已經刊登在《實驗生物學》，科學家們希望蜜蜂簡單的大腦結構可以成為面孔自動識別的模型，用以幫助FBI的偵破工作。
