According to new research of Prof. Randolph Mensal from the Free University in Berlin, the popular image of bees as the ultimate hard workers was inaccurate. “Although we see bees buzzing around tirelessly in spring and summer, the common belief in a bee’s busy nature is based on a misconception,” he said. People only really see bees when they’re out flying, or they look at a colony of bees and see thousands of them buzzing around. They don’t get to pick them out as individuals. The professor, who this month won a German Zoological Society award for his work on bees, added that bees compensated for their apparent laziness with high intelligence: advanced memory skills and an ability to learn quickly.
The suggestion that bees were not pulling their weight met with skepticism from British beekeepers. Glyn Davies, the President of the British Beekeepers Association, said that bees were not lazy but efficient. “At any particular stage in its life, a bee has a specific job to do. If they are
unable to do that job, they conserve their energy by doing nothing. Each bee has a unit of life energy and the faster it works, the faster it dies. They are being very wise and perhaps humans should try to follow their example instead of running about like headless chickens.”
The idea of the busy bee is several thousand years old. One current author who has nothing but admiration for the bee is Paul Theroux, the novelist and part-time beekeeper. “I have never seen a bee sleeping. My bees never stop working,” he said. Mr. Theroux, who keeps 85 hives each containing 300,000 bees in Hawaii, added that Prof. Mendel’s research could have been affected by his national origins. “Perhaps in comparison to the German rate of work, the bee does look lazy,” he said.
Few people think that the busy bee idea will go away, despite the efforts of Prof. Mensah It performs too many useful functions in our culture. In fact, the worship of bees seems to be undergoing a renaissance. IBM recently ran a series of ads drawing on the “waggle dance” of bees, telling businessmen to “make your business waggle.”
1.Prof. Randolph Mendel’s latest research （ ）.
2.According to Prof. Randolph Mensal, which of the following is NOT true?
3.According to Glyn Davies, what should we learn from bees?
4.The IBM ads in the passage are used to（ ）.
