Prof Lars Chittka: The social intelligence of bees

Ants, bees and wasps build cohesive societies with small brains and 10s of thousands to millions of individuals. Just like in humans, these societies are not (only) held together by individual recognition, but by learnt cues that indicate the location of society, and the place of the individual within it. There are various forms of social learning in the insects, where insects learn from one another where and how to forage, or where to expect danger. A unique process of social information processing is observed in honey bee swarms, where a democratic decision making process takes place to find a new home for the swarm.
Prof Lars Chittka studied Biology in Berlin and completed his PhD studies under the supervision of Randolf Menzel in 1993. He is now a full professor at Queen Mary, University of London, where he founded a new Research Centre for Psychology in 2008 and was its scientific director. He has carried out extensive work on the behaviour, cognition and ecology of bumble bees and honey bees, and their interactions with flowers. He has published over 250 peer-reviewed articles, has been an editor of biology’s leading open access journal PLoS Biology since 2004. He is an elected Member of the German National Academy of Sciences (Leopoldina), a Fellow of the Linnean Society and Royal Entomological Society, as well as the Royal Society of Biology.