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🎁 中英文稿：
The widespread death of honeybees has some farmers fretting: if honeybees disappear, who will pollinate their crops? "Almost any kind of insect you can think of." Margie Mayfield, an ecologist at The University of Queensland in Australia. "Globally speaking flies are probably the second largest group of crop pollinators. In particular a group called hoverflies, or syrphid flies. And these are these large-eyed flies that if you take a hike you sometimes see them hovering in front of your face."
蜜蜂大規模死亡讓一些農民擔心：如果蜜蜂消失，那麼誰來為他們的莊稼授粉呢?“幾乎你能想到的所有種類的昆蟲，”Margie Mayfield是澳大利亞的昆士蘭大學的生物學家，他說到：“從全球範圍來講，昆蟲可能是為莊稼授粉的第二大群體。尤其有一種群體叫做食蚜蠅，這些大眼睛蒼蠅，如果你出去徒步的話，有時候你會看見它們在你面前盤旋。”
Along with hoverflies, the army of under-appreciated pollinators includes butterflies, moths, beetles, ants and wasps. Mayfield and her colleagues analyzed more than three dozen studies on pollination, covering 17 crop plants grown on five continents. And they found that these underdog insects accounted for some 40 percent of the flower visits. Some of the crops in their review--especially tropical ones like mangoes and custard apples--did not rely on honeybees at all. Even commodities like canola did fine without bees. The meta-analysis is in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
除了食蚜蠅，其他的授粉群體還包括蝴蝶、蛾子、甲蟲、螞蟻還有黃蜂。Mayfield和她的同事們分析了30多個關於授粉的研究，這些研究作物涵蓋了5個洲17種莊稼作物。研究發現這些不被看好的昆蟲佔據了花訪客的40%。其中接受監督的一些莊稼作物——尤其是芒果以及番荔枝等熱帶植物——一點也不依賴蜜蜂。甚至商業作物花籽油沒有蜜蜂授粉也可以。該研究結果發表在《美國國家科學院院刊》雜誌上。
Mayfield says part of the difficulty in gauging the importance of bees starts with the research methods: a third of the studies they initially considered, for example, ignored everything but bees. "You know the European honeybee is obviously from Europe, so there's a lot of focus on the European honeybee there." Another issue, she says, is raising awareness among farmers. "I've encountered farmers in California and in South Africa and in Australia who spray their pesticides largely at night, because that's when the bees have gone back to their hives.
Mayfield稱，評估蜜蜂重要性的難度一部分在於開始的研究方法：例如，他們最初認為，1/3的研究，應該忽視其他因素，只考慮蜜蜂。“大家都知道很明顯歐洲蜜蜂來自歐洲，所以，重點放在了歐洲蜜蜂。”她還說，另一個問題是增加農民的意識。“我曾經見過加州、南美以及澳大利亞的農民，在晚上大肆捕殺昆蟲，因為蜜蜂在晚上回蜂巢。”
And they do that with the idea that we'll spare our pollinators and control our pests. But that very much takes the assumption that only bees are important pollinators." Of course we should still do our best to save honeybees--the celebrity pollinators. But agricultural practices should consider the rest of these tiny farm workers, too.
“他們這樣做是因為他們認為這樣將會寬恕我們的傳粉昆蟲，並控制害蟲。但是這一想法的前提假設是只有蜜蜂是重要的傳粉者。”當然，我們會盡最大的努力保護蜜蜂——著名的傳粉專家。但是農業在實踐中也要考慮其他小小農業 ‘工人’。
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