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...

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/...

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

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

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!

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:

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.

It’s not every day one’s work is highlighted by UNESCO 😊https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/inside-mind-bee

🆕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 😊

Looking forward to giving a presentation at the Sonoma County Beekeepers Association in Santa Rosa, California, tonight.

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.

A blog about the Planet & People conference at which I spoke recently in Newcastle: planetandpeople.online/join-the-dot...

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")

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 🙂

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...

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!

New paper: habituation to threatening stimuli in bumblebees is far from simple! psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...

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...

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?

🚨 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...

One of the highlights this year was giving the B.F. Skinner Lecture at the ABAI conference in Washington DC and then meeting the man himself in the corridor. Despite our many disagreements, Dr. Skinner listened patiently and respectfully and we parted as friends. 😉

Do we need yet another metric for measuring academic performance? Well yes, obviously, if that's how the results pan out 😉

New paper! Flexible cognition can arise when oscillatory activity organizes where information can be expressed in neuronal spiking. Oscillatory control of cortical space as a computational dimension www.cell.com/current-biol... @picowerinstitute.bsky.social @mitbcs.bsky.social #neuroscience

Very proud of this new paper from the lab! Work by the magnificent Andrea Adden and many brilliant collaborators illuminate how moth and butterfly brains have evolved in light of different ecologies. Freely available here: rdcu.be/eVR3B; @lundvision.bsky.social @biologylu.bsky.social

A lovely review of the French version of The Mind of a Bee, by Bruno Corbara, in the December issue of Espèces

Just shared in Biology Letters @royalsociety: 👉 Lars Chittka: “Bumblebees don’t just copy — they evaluate when social cues are useful.” Read the full paper here: doi.org/10.1098/rsbl... #Bees #SocialLearning #AnimalBehaviour #BiologyLetters #TheRoyalSociety

Queen Mary bee expert Professor Lars Chittka praised for his performance as an “unhinged and uncompromising scientist” in acclaimed film. www.qmul.ac.uk/media/news/2...

Planning a one-afternoon visual psychophysics practical for undergraduate students. Does anyone know a good platform to collect quantitative data on visual acuity, the blindspot, colour mixture, depth perception, edge detection, lateral inhibition, motion adaptation, visual illusions etc?

Last gig of the year, tomorrow!

Important new paper on the effects on floral gloss on detectability and flower identification by pollinators: www.science.org/doi/full/10....

Super excited that Osseily Hanna's "The Last Bee" won the Best Fiction Film Trophy at the Festival Internacional de Cine Animal y Ambiental in Mexico this week. The film will be released in 2026 - stay tuned!

New PhD position available! For applicants keen to combine evolutionary ecology, neuroscience and animal cognition. Based at UCL with me, @maxreuter.bsky.social, @fcamus.bsky.social and Tamara Boto (Bristol). Directly funded, see here for details and eligibility: www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

Víte, že na světě existuje více než 20 000 druhů včel?🐝 Do jejich fascinujícího smyslového světa můžete nahlédnout díky knize Včelí mysl, která právě vychází.📖🙂 Jejím autorem je německý biolog Lars Chittka. Z angličtiny přeložil Pavel Pecháček. Více o NOVINCE👇 www.academia.cz/knihy?id=3485

Fue un reto interesante interpretar a un científico loco en la película del director Mexicano Osse Hanna Gomez, La Última Abeja, also starring Michelle Maldonado! Aquí esta una primera reseña de la película: periodistasunidos.com.mx/nacional/cul...

The perfect paper title doesn't exi... - wonderful work just out in Science from Hugo Merchant and team: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Our smart bees in Shaastra, a science and technology magazine published by the Indian Institute of Technology

Sliiiight exaggeration there by CNN, but nonetheless happy about this new collaborative study with Eli Versace's team: @elisabettaversace.bsky.social edition.cnn.com/2025/11/12/s...

Do bees see nothing? Primates with damage to the visual cortex have no conscious visual experience, but display adaptive visual behaviour (a phenomenon called blindsight). Here I team up with two primate researchers to ask if bee vision could be similar to blindsight. www.cell.com/trends/cogni...