Chittka has carried out extensive work on the behaviour, cognition and ecology of bumblebees and honeybees, and their interactions with flowers.[1][2][5] He developed perceptual models of animal colour vision, allowing the derivation of optimal receiver systems as well as a quantification of the evolutionary pressures shaping flower signals. Chittka also made fundamental contributions to the understanding of animal cognition and its fitness benefits in the economy of nature. He explored phenomena such as numerosity, speed-accuracy trade-offs, false memories and social learning in bees.[5] His discoveries have made a substantial impact on the understanding of animal intelligence and its neural-computational underpinnings. He has published over 250 peer-reviewed articles,[5][10] many of them highly cited.[10]
Science, music and art
Chittka has been involved in a number of collaborative works linking the science of bees with music and art. With musicians Katie Green and Rob Alexander, he formed the band Killer Bee Queens.[11] In 2019, they released the post-punk inspired concept album Strange Flowers on Bandcamp.[12] Two music videos were published; “I stung Gwyneth Paltrow” [13] referred to the pseudoscientific method of bee stings as a treatment for minor skin conditions, as advocated by the actress.[14] The video for “The Beekeeper’s Dream” used footage from David Blair's 1991 surrealist film "Wax or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees".[15]
Chittka also worked with installation artist Julian Walker on a project in which live bees’ responses to famous paintings were evaluated (“Do Bees Like Van Gogh’s Sunflowers?”).[16][17][18][19] Chittka and Walker explained that they used “this unconventional approach in the hope to raise awareness for between-species differences in visual perception, and to provoke thinking about the implications of biology in human aesthetics and the relationship between object representation and its biological connotations.”[16]
Data collected by Chittka's team on the life-long radar-tracking of individual bumblebees' flights[20] formed the basis for artwork by Lucy Pullen which was on display at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics from 2018-2020. Some of the images are now in a collection of the Royal Bank of Canada, Toronto.[21]
Chittka also contributed to a science-music project with artist Aladin Borioli, called “Shared Sensibilities”[22] in which sections of an interview about Chittka’s research were combined with the music of Laurent Güdel[23] and the sounds of honeybees, aired on BBC Radio 6 in 2020.[24]
Bibliography
Journal articles: most highly cited
Briscoe, Adriana D.; Chittka, Lars (January 2001). "The evolution of color vision in insects". Annual Review of Entomology. 46 (1): 471–510. doi:10.1146/annurev.ento.46.1.471. PMID11112177.
Chittka, Lars (June 1992). "The colour hexagon: a chromaticity diagram based on photoreceptor excitations as a generalized representation of colour opponency". Journal of Comparative Physiology A. 170 (5). doi:10.1007/BF00199331. S2CID2016607.
Chittka, Lars; Thomson, James D., eds. (2001). Cognitive Ecology of Pollination: Animal Behaviour and Floral Evolution. Cambridge University Press. ISBN978-1-139-43004-3.
Chittka, Lars (2022). The Mind of a Bee. Princeton University Press. ISBN978-0-691-18047-2.
