Lars Chittka is professor of sensory and behavioral ecology at Queen Mary University of London, where he founded a new Research Centre for Psychology in 2008 and was its scientific director until 2012. He is the author of The Mind of a Bee and is the coeditor of Cognitive Ecology of Pollination. He studied Biology in Berlin and completed his PhD studies under the supervision of Randolf Menzel in 1993. He has carried out extensive work on the behaviour, cognition and ecology of bumble bees and honey bees, and their interactions with flowers. 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, and has been an editor of biology’s foremost 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."The world of bees is under threat, and that is not because bees are singled out, but because bees live in the environment that we all share and they are a kind of a canary in the coal mine for what's going on more largely in destroying our environment. And in a sense they are, I think, a useful sort of mascot and icon to highlight these troubles, but they are only a signpost of other things that are also under threat. We need the bee for our own food because they pollinate our crops, and they pollinate the flowers that we enjoy, but I think their utility for us is not the only reason to support them and their environment. I think the growing appreciation that the world that surrounds us is full of sophisticated and unique minds places on us a kind of onus and obligation to preserve the diversity of these minds that are out there and make sure that they continue to thrive."http://chittkalab.sbcs.qmul.ac.uk/Lars.htmlhttps://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691180472/the-mind-of-a-beehttps://journals.plos.org/plosbiologywww.oneplanetpodcast.orgwww.creativeprocess.infoPhoto credit: Markus Scholz / Leopoldina