I have been thinking long and hard about the topic of my first ever post on my personal website, long enough to the point I’ve also contemplated when I should actually begin releasing content. Knowing that World Bee Day is coming up (celebrated on the 20th of May every year), I figured that I would explain to you all how it all started: how I got into bees.

It all began back when I was still studying for my bachelors degree at Imperial College London. I had joined a student-led society that did gardening as group activities, and indeed they had a quaint but decently-sized allotment in the middle of the South Kensington campus. Within this little retreat from the bustling Exhibition Road were two bee hives, kept and maintained by the society’s own committee members. I had a lot of fun in every gardening session I joined, and I even got a chance to attend a ‘hive tour’ and saw the inside of a hive for the first time.

Hi! My name is Heiloi, but most people just call me Louie. I am currently a PhD Student at Newcastle University looking into active vision in bumblebees.

My Project

I’m currently working on a project with the Nityananda Lab of Newcastle University, looking into how bumblebees make use of active vision to recognise and discriminate different visual stimuli. In short, I’m training bumblebees to perform pattern discrimination tasks, and then I’m analysing the bees’ flight movements as they complete the task.