雅思聽力:蜜蜂的相互影響 (3/4)

How will you know if Asian bees have entered Australia? We're looking at the diet of the bird called the Rainbow Bee Eater. The Bee Eater doesn't care what it eats, as long as they're insects. But the interesting thing about this bird is that we are able to analyse exactly what it eats and that's really helpful if we're looking for introduced insects. How come? Because insects have their skeletons outside their bodies, so the Bee Eaters digest the meat from the inside. Then they bring up all the indigestible bits of skeleton and, of course, the wings in a pellet, a small ball of waste material which they cough up. That sounds a bit unpleasant. So, how do you go about it? In the field we track down the Bee Eaters and find their favourite feeding spots, you know, the places where the birds usually feed. It's here that we can find the pellets. We collect them up and take them back to the laboratory to examine the contents.