Media Appearances
Explaining my research for a general audience
This was a particularly fun one: I was filmed for a CBBC kids reality show which followed a group of young beekeepers learning the ancient art of beekeeping. In this segment, I show Maddie Moate how I attach a tiny transponder to bumblebees and how we can then use harmonic radar to follow a bee as it learns to find its way around the world. Once we've recorded our bee's flight, Maddie visits Vince Gallo at Prof Lars Chittka's famous bee behaviour lab and he turns the data into an immersive virtual reality experience that allows her to see for herself exactly what our bee had been up to. Click here to watch the entire program on iPlayer. The experiment Maddie helped me with has not yet been published, but I've published plenty or other work on how bees learn about their surroundings: find out more here or here or here.
In this 2020 series for Channel 4, Jimmy Doherty, of Jimmy's Farm notoriety, investigated the worrying decline in wild bee numbers across the UK and looked into various ways we might be able to help. In order to find out what insights the latest research might have, he filmed this segment with me and the harmonic radar. I explain how we can use the radar to investigate where bees go when they are away from the nest, and how understanding more about how bees look for food might help us plan conservation measures to ensure our efforts help the bees as much as possible. We track the flight of a bumblebee worker as she explores the world for the very first time. Click here to watch the entire program on Channel 4, or here or here to read more about several studies in which I investigated how bees first learn about their surroundings and how that affects their future lives as foragers.
The One Show: Orbeenteering, 2019
The entomologist George McGavin visited Joanna Brebner and me at Rothamsted Research for this short film, shown on the One Show on BBC One in 2019. We show him our brand new harmonic radar and how we use it to investigate how bees learn so much about their surroundings that they can find their way home, even when we rudely catch them and move them elsewhere
In this BBC Three documentary, first broadcast in 2015, the mathematician Marcus de Sautoy reveals how ingenious algorithmic computations underly the marvels of the computer age. In this clip, Marcus introduces the Traveling Salesman Problem, a very famous unsolved problem in maths and computer science, in which we want to efficiently discover the shortest route between a set of known waypoints. I explain that bees have the same problem - trying to find an efficient way to visit many flowers, collecting nectar and pollen - and we investigate how they tackle the famous problem. Click here to see the entire program on Youtube, or here to learn more about the experiment this was based on.
UK Research & Innovation is the umbrella body that coordinates the country's nine research councils, which between them oversee the majority of publicly funded research in the UK. Their 101 Jobs campaign aims to explain what researchers actually do and to highlight the huge diversity of research taking place in this country. I was delighted to be asked to be one of the 101 researchers profiled for this project. In this video I explain a bit about the work I do and why I do it, and walk you through an experiment I was working on, asking what aspects of a bees exploratory flight allows her to learn her way home.
I was a member of Brains on Board, an ambitious collaboration across three universities that aimed to discover the properties of the honeybee brain that account for their incredible learning and navigational abilities, and to use our discoveries to create advanced, autonomous robots that would be a giant leap forward from current technology. My role was to investigate what bees actually do in the wild and, in collaboration with brilliant colleagues across the country, to work out how they do it. My harmonic radar tracking project was featured prominently in this video about the project, filmed for a showcase event at the Science Museum, London in December 2021.