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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，它们没有任何理由非要区分出人类的面孔，但是它们的确可以。早在2005年来自蒙纳士大学的Arian Dyer就已指出蜜蜂可以区分出谁是和它们做伴的人谁又是给它们甜点的。但是它们是真的能区分出人类，还是仅把人类当成了一种奇怪的花朵。
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.
法国科学家Martin Giurfa和Dyer共同对这一课题进行研究。首先他们用点线画出简单的人物头像：点代表眼睛，斜线代表鼻子和嘴巴；随后对蜜蜂进行区分不同面孔的训练。科学家们尝试让蜜蜂从人脸图形和随机点线构成的非人类面孔图形之间选择出人类面孔图形，如果蜜蜂选择正确将被奖励甜食。
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.
这些蜜蜂面临的终极挑战是从一堆人脸图形中辨识出真正的人类面孔，它们奇迹般的成功了——看来蜜蜂的确可以区分人脸。这一实验已经刊登在《实验生物学》，科学家们希望蜜蜂简单的大脑结构可以成为面孔自动识别的模型，用以帮助FBI的侦破工作。
