Raina Jain's STS project started in science class. Her teacher challenged teen and her classmates to find global problems in the news that lacked solutions. Raina, 17, zeroed in on colony collapse disorder in bees. This happens when worker bees abandon their hive, eventually causing the hive to die.
Raina visited a beekeeper, a friend of her parents. She wanted to observe this problem up close. “Every year, he loses 60 percent of his hives,” she learned. “That shocked me.”
Parasites play a role in colony collapse disorder. A chemical called thymol can help rid bees of the parasites. Beekeepers often leave out a thymol containing substance. Bees can apply it to themselves while cleaning. But that substance doesn't work the same way at all temperatures, Raina notes. On hot days, for instance, it releases higher levels of thymol-amounts that might harm bees. The substance also might limit bees' ability to fly.
Raina wondered if there was a better way to protect bees. She developed her own thymol-containing substance. Then she designed a 3D- printed beehive entrance that would coat the bees. She tested how fast her substance would degrade in the sun and wind by applying the substance to bee models. Raina even kept a beehive in her backyard to test the substance's effectiveness.
Now, hundreds of beekeepers around the United States are helping Raina further test her invention. “Probably the hardest part of my project was to get people to actually use it”, Raina says. “It took time and thousands of emails. But now further data collection is underway.”
【小题1】What does the underlined part in the first paragraph mean?| A．Avoided the field of. | B．Suffered from. | C．Knew nothing about. | D．Focused on. |
| A．To ask advice from him. | B．To do field observation of bees. |
| C．To ask for some bees for experiments. | D．To observe how a beekeeper raises bees. |
| A．artificial bees | B．bees raised by herself |
| C．the beehive in her backyard | D．the 3D-printed beehive entrance |
| A．Putting it into practical use. | B．Improving its effectiveness. |
| C．Finding out whether it works well. | D．Getting support for it from beekeepers. |
