As a second year PhD candidate (at the time of writing), I’ve been very grateful for the handful of opportunities I got to attend a conference and talk about science. It’s always fascinating to hear about what others work on from a diverse range of research fields, and sometimes I even get to present my own work through a poster or short talk. Thing is, up until now I’ve only been travelling within the country to attend these conferences. All of that was about to change when I received news that I was accepted for a talk at the International Congress of Neuroethology, scheduled to take place at Vancouver in late July of 2026. Seeing that notification in my inbox made me very excited, but also kind of terrified. It would be the very first time I’ve crossed the Atlantic ocean and stepped foot on one of the American continents. Above all, it would be the biggest conference that I’ve ever attended in my life, with an audience more specialised and probably more knowledgeable in the very field my own project is based on! Alas, I knew there was no way I would pass up such a thrilling opportunity, so without hesitation (and a bit of self-hyping) I registered my place at the event and booked my plane tickets.

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.