Spying on the secret lives of bees

Raising the Bar

Spying on the secret lives of bees by Guy Warman

Sweat Shop

Raising the Bar Auckland

Raising the Bar Auckland is back on Tuesday 26 August, 2025, with 20 free talks at 10 venues. 

Get your free tickets today and join us for a night of innovation and inspiration!

<h3>Talk Description</h3><p>Honeybees are tremendously important to humans, mainly as pollinators of the plants we eat. But they also rely on humans for survival: pests such as the Varroa mite are fatal to bees, and without human control of these mites, honeybees die.</p><p>Despite the importance of honeybees to Aotearoa, because they live inside a dark hive, it has never been possible to measure their behaviour without opening the hive and breaking the colony apart. As a result, assessing honeybee health has always been difficult.</p><p>In this talk, Dr Guy Warman will explain how he and his colleagues have developed new ways to understand the behaviour and communication of bees within their hives without disrupting them – by measuring the patterns of electrostatic fields they produce inside the hive. By translating this “electric language”, we can begin to understand the signatures and rhythms of a healthy colony, and the early signs of changes in honeybee health.</p><p><br></p><h3>Bio</h3><p>Associate Professor Guy Warman is a chronobiologist at the University of Auckland. Chronobiology is the study of biological rhythms and the internal biological clocks that control them. Guy’s research ranges from work on model organisms such as bees and fruit flies, through to clinical trials on patients undergoing general anaesthesia at Te Toka Tumai.  The purpose of his research is to understand how clocks affect health and disease in humans and other animals, and to investigate ways to support these clocks to improve health.</p><p><br></p><p><br></p>

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