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Click here to listen to an audio clip ​ I was interviewed by the BBC World Service’s Newshour program about my then-recently-published study in which we tracked every flight made by bumblebee workers throughout their entire lives (Woodgate et al 2016 ). I’ve done quite a few radio interviews over the years, but they don’t seem to stick around in cyberspace the way print media do and I don’t think any others are still accessible. ​

Science Here, you can find details about my research career Papers Research papers are the main output from most academic research. They are where we explain what we’ve done and what we think it means. In this section, I explain the science behind each of my published papers. You can also read the published versions or visit the journal websites. Other writing I am gradually adding links to various bits of writing I've done for a generalist, non-technical audience, including several popular science pieces for The Conversation, explaining my research, which were quite widely republished. Data visualisation One of my favourite aspects of scientific research is finding new ways to visualise data. When done well, a good visualisation makes clear the relationships between variables and allows you to see beneath the surface to get a feel for how things really work. ​ Here, I show a few of my favourite examples from my own research. Media appearances Like many researchers, I'm passionate about what I do, and I want to tell people why it's so exciting. It simply doesn't make sense to discover interesting and useful things about the world, unless we pass on our findings to th e public, so I'm always keen to do outreach. My research has been featured on several TV documentaries, over the years. I look and sound fairly ridiculous, but here are some clips, if you want them. Press Most scientists do what they do because they genuinely believe it's useful to society, so it can be a little dispiriting to publish your research and find that only a handful of other researchers ever know about it. Some of my scientific discoveries have garnered a gratifying amount of press attention, though. It means a lot to me to have the public be able to discover this work. Here are a few press clippings. Links I've been very fortunate to have worked with and been mentored by a lot of very inspiring scientists. Here are some links to their various endeavours.

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Woodgate et al. (2016) PLoS ONE 11(8): e0160333 Life-long radar tracking of bumblebees Check back later for further details.

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Woodgate et al. (2011) Behavioral Ecology 22: 566-573 Developmental stressors that impair song learning in males do not appear to affect female preferences for song complexity in the zebra finch Check back later for further details.

Woodgate et al. (2017) Scientific Reports 7: 17323 Continuous radar tracking illustrates the development of multi-destination routes of bumblebees Check back later for further details.

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Bridges et al. (2023) Plos Biology 21(3): e3002019 Bumblebees acquire alternative puzzlebox solutions via social learning Researchers and philosophers fiercely debate what exactly culture is and whether non-human animals have it in some form, but one widely used definition is that culture involves shared, learned behavioural traditions which persist in a population over time. Alice Bridges’ PhD project was to investigate whether bees have culture under this definition. In this study, she painstakingly taught individual bees how to open a “puzzlebox” to get food, then returned them to their colonies. She showed that their untaught nest-mates picked up this behaviour by watching them. The box-opening skill spread through the colony and continued even after the original “demonstrator” bees had died. There’s no reason to suppose that new bees couldn’t learn from these second-generation learners so, hypothetically, box-opening could persist indefinitely. ​ Crucially, there were two possible ways to open the box, but learner bees were almost always faithful to the method used by their “demonstrator”, so each colony wound up with its own distinctive way of doing things. Even after some bees discovered the alternative method for themselves, they went back to doing it the way they were taught. In another experiment, four demonstrators were introduced to the colony, two trained with each method. In the end, one method became dominant throughout the colony while the other went extinct, apparently due to chance variation in how enthusiastic the demonstrators were, how quickly they died and so on. ​ This all suggests that purely arbitrary cultural traditions can become fixed in bee colonies and persist for long periods. The life cycle of bumblebees means that only queens survive across multiple seasons, so there is probably little chance of multi-generational cultural traditions being maintained in bumblebees as they are in humans, but it opens up the interesting possibility that there might be other insect species with something we’d recognize as culture. ​ I didn’t play a huge role in this one, mainly advising on how to analyse the data and report on the results, but it’s been great fun working with Alice and watching her ideas develop over the past few years.

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