A new documentary "Secrets of The Bees" will air on National Geographic on 31 March and land on Disney+ on 1 April and our bees are in it! See here for the trailer: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mej2...
03.03.2026 19:29 — 👍 22 🔁 7 💬 0 📌 1
A new documentary "Secrets of The Bees" will air on National Geographic on 31 March and land on Disney+ on 1 April and our bees are in it! See here for the trailer: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mej2...
03.03.2026 19:29 — 👍 22 🔁 7 💬 0 📌 1
Entomology technician post in my lab in London (position is for 11 months starting August 2026). The work is about sentience and cognition in a variety of insect species. Thank you for sharing (and applying)! qmul-jobs.tal.net/vx/mobile-0/...
24.02.2026 15:19 — 👍 27 🔁 30 💬 0 📌 1
Have you ever asked yourself, how insect brains represent places? And whether insects do have place cells? Then move to Germany this summer and start your PhD in my lab. We conduct tetrode recordings from bumblebees that freely forage laboratory mazes. 🧠🐝#BeeSpace @erc.europa.eu @neuroethology.org
20.02.2026 12:06 — 👍 38 🔁 32 💬 0 📌 1
My home in Austria, for the duration of the Annual Meeting of the Ethologische Gesellschaft 😊 - happy to give a plenary talk here today (will be a tough challenge following on from Rosemary Grant's plenary yesterday) @queenmarycbb.bsky.social
20.02.2026 06:40 — 👍 15 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
The @asab.org animal behavior ethics guidelines now reference our work on humane husbandry and ethical study design for insects and decapods! See the full guidelines:
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Looking forward to this event in April!
11.02.2026 11:49 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
The IWRS is hiring! Help us build the infrastructure for invertebrate welfare research—from husbandry databases to educational resources. 🐛📖
Remote Research Scientist position, $55-60K. We will begin reviewing applications on March 15.
Learn more and apply here:
Three books lying flat: Apprentice To The Wild by Kurt Hoelting The Mind Of A Bee by Lars Chittka Dog Songs by Mary Oliver
Seven books lying flat: I Was a Middle-Aged Wolfman: Chasing Wolves in Idaho's Backcountry by Jim Holyan Seabirds: The New Identification Guide by Peter Harrison Around The Salish Sea: Plants and Art by Alice Derry (three volumes) In Praise of Mystery by Ada Limon From BAM! to BURP! A Carbon Atom’s Never-Ending Journey through Space and Time and YOU by Melissa Stewart
Four books lying flat: The Trees Are Speaking: Dispatches from the Salmon Forests by Lynda Mapes Is A River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane Seabirds As Sentinels: Auklets, Puffins, Shearwaters, and the View from Destruction Island by Eric Wagner Explore the Salish Sea: A Nature Guide for Kids by Joseph Gaydos and Audrey Benedict
New on the podcast - books! The hosts of Nature Now - Jackie Canterbury, Nan Evans, and Debaran Kelso - start the year by sharing their favorite books about natural history.
#naturewriting #booksky
15 yrs since we published this, but some scholars still define (animal) colour vision as just wavelength discrimination independently of intensity. Colour vision requires having vision - and this means seeing an image in which things have colour properties.
06.02.2026 10:07 — 👍 10 🔁 4 💬 0 📌 0
It’s not every day one’s work is highlighted by UNESCO 😊https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/inside-mind-bee
24.01.2026 17:49 — 👍 7 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
🆕Chittka beim BR – Wissenschaftspodcast, Bayern 2, IQ – Wissenschaft und Forschung
Hier anhören: www.br.de/mediathek/po...
🆕 Neues vom Bienenforscher Lars Chittka, Autor von „Im Cockpit der Biene“
Nachlesen: www.kreiszeitung.de/lokales/verd...
Not sure we can keep up this pace for all of 2026 but here's our third paper this year 😊
20.01.2026 13:38 — 👍 6 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
Looking forward to giving a presentation at the Sonoma County Beekeepers Association in Santa Rosa, California, tonight.
19.01.2026 21:24 — 👍 4 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Currently reading this by Otto Plath, father of poet Sylvia Plath. The son of a blacksmith, Plath emigrated from Germany to the US as a 15yr old. His grandfather financed Plath's education on condition that he would become a minister. He eventually dropped out & later became a successful scientist.
19.01.2026 15:42 — 👍 13 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0Haha that's an interesting perspective! Martin Lindauer thought that von Frisch's lectures were fascinating though
15.01.2026 15:51 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0It was a gift from a friend in Vienna who lived next to an Antiquariat where they had many of von Frisch's books. He knew that von Frisch was my scientific great-grandfather
15.01.2026 15:23 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
A blog about the Planet & People conference at which I spoke recently in Newcastle: planetandpeople.online/join-the-dot...
15.01.2026 14:11 — 👍 6 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 2
Latest addition to my office library: from Karl von Frisch‘s possessions, a book written by his student Martin Lindauer. The dedication reads "Meinem grossen Lehrmeister in Dankbarkeit zum 75. Geburtstag" ("To my great teaching-master in gratitude for the 75th birthday")
15.01.2026 10:42 — 👍 10 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
PhD studentship available to work on insect cognition in my team via the CSC scheme (Chinese applicants only; deadline January 28). See here:
www.qmul.ac.uk/sbbs/postgra...
I've just discovered in an 1830 article that stalk-eyed flies used to be called Perspectivfliegen ("perspective flies") in German, probably referring to the notion that their eye distance must afford some unique form of binocular perspective, and I just love that 🙂
11.01.2026 14:00 — 👍 7 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
Now with final page numbers - our exploration of whether bee vision might be like the non-conscious visual processing found in blindsighted humans: Tamietto, M., Orsenigo, D., Chittka, L. (2026) Bees, blindsight and consciousness. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 30 (1): 6-9; doi.org/10.1016/j.ti...
08.01.2026 14:26 — 👍 10 🔁 4 💬 0 📌 0
Giving a speech in Pristina/Kosovo this Saturday. Online attendance is possible via us06web.zoom.us/j/8632359549....
Meeting ID: 863 2359 5495
Passcode: 1234
My first presentation of 2026 will be in Pristina/Kosovo for Albanian-language beekeepers and I just have to say I love this totally unique language!
07.01.2026 13:00 — 👍 3 🔁 3 💬 0 📌 0
New paper: habituation to threatening stimuli in bumblebees is far from simple! psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...
06.01.2026 14:47 — 👍 8 🔁 3 💬 0 📌 0
Fun to do this podcast with Stephen Fleming and Richard Rickitt of the journal BeeCraft about my role as a mad scientist in the film The Last Bee: www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpPG...
05.01.2026 12:36 — 👍 4 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
I found this image on my computer but can't locate the source. From memory, it's from Sigmund Exner's work on the visual resolution of insect compound eyes, but I haven't found the original publication that contains the image. Does anyone know?
03.01.2026 19:01 — 👍 7 🔁 3 💬 1 📌 0
🚨 Tenure-track professorship at Goethe University of Frankfurt, Germany, with a focus on evolutionary ecology of social hymenoptera 🐝🐜
Initially for 6 years:
www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/pr...
