Spontaneous problem-solving in bumble bees | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Excited by this new paper from Olli Loukola's team! edition.cnn.com/2026/06/04/s...

In case this wasn't amply clear already, here you can find out how insects beat AI 😉https://www.buzzsprout.com/2405788/episodes/19212921-why-houseflies-see-faster-than-ai

Mikko Juusola is interviewed on Chinese television about our recent paper on high-speed vision in flies: m.mgtv.com/b/820868/244...

Thank you so much to the @royalsociety.org for this wonderful honour and to all the wonderful young people who have, over the years, been bold enough to join our somewhat eccentric endeavour of trying to understand an insect mind! And a big thank you to the bees of course! 🥹🙏

At the BLOOM science and music festival in Copenhagen, there are giant tardigrades and I guess that’s all I need to say about just how magnificent the event is 😊

Male bumblebees seek mates by depositing sex pheromones. To study how ♂️🐝balance mate-seeking and feeding behavior @natacharossi.bsky.social, @larschittka.bsky.social et al. tracked ♂️🐝in an indoor flight cage and show that ♂️🐝prioritize mate-seeking over energy gain. academic.oup.com/beheco/advan...

Looking forward to speaking at the BLOOM Science Festival in Copenhagen next week: www.bloom.ooo/english-prog...

Hoy es el Día Mundial de las Abejas y, para conmemorar la ocasión, se estrena para el público la premiada película de Osseily Hanna, The Last Bee (en la que interpreto a un científico loco): www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkE3...

It's World Bee Day today and to mark the occasion, Osseily Hanna's award-winning film The Last Bee (in which I play a mad scientist) is released for public viewing: m.youtube.com/watch?v=BeOu...

On #WorldBeeDay, we’re revisiting a #BIGIDEAS conversation that explored just how extraordinary insect minds can be. 🐝 Investigator @gallseeker.bsky.social, and author of The Mind of a Bee @larschittka.bsky.social, explored how insects reshape the world around them. Watch the convo: bit.ly/4mD7rfm

New paper out! url.uk.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/NJAHCB6RxF... @oupacademic.bsky.social @behavecol.bsky.social @larschittka.bsky.social

How to begin a proper introduction to a scientific paper. 😉From: Rau, P., and Rau, N.L. 1929. The sex attraction and rhythmic periodicity in giant Saturniid moths.Acad. Sci. St. Louis. Trans. 26:83–221. Have a lovely weekend everyone!

New paper just out! We tend to think of rapid movement as something that blurs vision but for houseflies this does not apply. They turns fast motion into an advantage, reorganising visual signals so efficiently that perception keeps pace with behaviour almost perfectly www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Very interesting to attend this conference on interspecies communication as a member of the science advisory group of the project: www.santafe.edu/events/inter...

It was a pleasure handling this as editor for @plosbiology.org

Cover of the May issue of the British Beekeepers Association Magazine

Watch the full #BIGIDEAS talk featuring @larschittka.bsky.social, Ph.D., and David Stern, Ph.D., as they explore how small creatures do remarkably complex things, and what that reveals about life itself. 🐝 ▶️ Watch here: youtu.be/tutk6rmFRo4?...

Monarch butterflies and Bogong moths are incredible navigators that annually migrate thousands of kilometers. In this review, Basil el Jundi and Eric Warrant @lundvision.bsky.social outline the neural mechansims underlying long-distance migration in insects. 🦋 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

What a splendid birthday surprise - I'm super happy to have been elected as a member of the Academia Europaea (Academy of Europe) @acad-euro.bsky.social. I am deeply grateful to the many people whose ideas and efforts shaped the work behind this honour. @qmul.bsky.social @qmulsbbs.bsky.social

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...