A lovely video of last week's Minds of Insects event at the Stowers Institute @stowersinstitute.bsky.social with David Stern @gallseeker.bsky.social - www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCW0...

A full house joined us at the Institute for BIG IDEAS: The Minds of Insects. 🐝 Speakers David Stern, Ph.D., and @larschittka.bsky.social Ph.D., took the audience inside the surprising #biology of aphids and bees. Explore the highlights & join us in the fall for another #BIGIDEAS! bit.ly/4mD7rfm

Looking forward to presenting at Janelia Research Campus @hhmijanelia.bsky.social today

My office for a week, at Janelia Research Campus 😊

#BIGIDEAS: The Minds of Insects underway! We are ready for an evening of conversation and discovery with Lars Chittka, Ph.D, and David Stern, Ph.D. 🐝

🐟+🐚 =🏠 Shell-dwelling cichlids are true underwater architects, instinctively transforming empty snail shells into protective nests. New research shows: They improve with practice, remember what they learned, and adapt to unusual conditions. 🔗 Press release: www.bi.mpg.de/news/2026-04...

“Flexible rhythm perception underpins human music, dance & speech. We show that bees form robust abstract rhythm representations. Results suggest an insect brain can encode & generalize arbitrary complex temporal patterns, pointing to deep evolutionary roots for domain‐general rhythm cognition.”😲 🐝🧪

Lovely NatGeo article by Hannah Nordhaus, featuring plenty of "nature's brightest thinkers", former team members Mathieu Lihoreau and Olli Loukola, plus myself (and with excellent photography by Karine Aigner): www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/arti...

The new James Cameron-produced NatGeo documentary "Secrets of the Bees" is out tomorrow. I hope it's good - our bees and team members are in it, but I haven't seen the final product yet. Here's a trailer.

New paper just out! With colleagues in Ken Tan's and James Nieh's team, we show that honeybees dance better when the audience is numerous, and engage in active audience-seeking when attendance is low (image by M. Kleinhenz/J. Tautz) www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Looking forward to speaking at this conference tomorrow morning: embodied-intelligence.org

We are searching for a new Department Head of Entomology at Virginia Tech. Come work in lovely Blacksburg with some pretty cool people and spectatular students. Please repost and spread the word. Review Date 4/26/26. jobs.apply.vt.edu/jobs/profess...

Looking forward to giving a plenary lecture at the Embodied Intelligence Conference (online) this Friday - looks like an exciting programme overall!

‪ 📣 Annual Meeting of the Ethologische Gesellschaft 2026 🎤 Keynote: Lars Chittka 🐝 A fascinating keynote at the intersection of behavior, ecology, and evolution. 🐝 📍 Grünau | 📅 Feb 18–21, 2026 Four days of science and exchange—where ethology made history. @univie.ac.at Picture: J: Hemetsberger

Fun to give a plenary at the annual conference of the Austrian Ethological Society, though a tough act to follow from Rosemary Grant a day earlier!

Do Bees Have Hobbies? Inside the Study Where Bumblebees Played with Wooden Balls: A study led by Lars Chittka and his colleagues has revealed that bumblebees may exhibit play behavior, a finding that challenges traditional views of insects as solely diligent workers. … https://ranked.news/152218?u=b

John Lubbock (1883) on individuality of bees. It's always a bit sad when people write that individual differences in animal psychology are a recent discovery. Using the cutesy label of "animal personality" doesn't make it novel. The study of the phenomenon is as old as the study of animal behaviour.

While motion 🏃 vision is generally thought of as achromatic, Supple et al. show that motion vision associated with target tracking in butterflies 🦋 is spectrally tuned 🌈 to conspecific wing coloration - likely to assess conspecific displays! 🚨 Check it out! www.cell.com/current-biol...

Cool work on cockroaches that literally clip each other’s wings to seal their lifelong relationship bond (with some comments from cockroach love expert Dr Chittka 😉): www.sciencenews.org/article/cock...

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...

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?