Data Visualisation
Looking for insights in datasets
A bumblebee worker repeatedly forages on the same flowers, gathering nectar to bring back to her nest. This video illustrates the way her route evolves over time: repeated parts of the route are reinforced and grow brighter, while abandoned portions fade away. After around 60 trips, she has settled on a repeatable and efficient flightpath (although it’s not the best possible route).
Click here to read more and watch the route development of two more bees.
We used harmonic radar technology to track every movement made by a worker bumblebee throughout her entire life. This video illustrates her whole life as a forager, from her first explorations of the world to her later dedication to collecting food for her nestmates.
Click here to read more about how I created the video.
This image combines visuals from several analyses to summarise my research on the previously mysterious movements of male honeybees, known as drones. These drones have only one purpose in life - to try to mate - but because they do it high in the air, no-one quite knew where. We attached an electronic transponder to 76 drones (top right), which allowed us to track their movements using harmonic radar (top left), revealing their secrets for the first time.
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Click here to learn more about what this picture tells us about honeybee mating behaviour.
Flight 8
Flight 15
Comparison
As a bumblebee worker gains experience foraging from an array of flowers, her flight path evolves. I developed a way to visualise how similar each flight is to the flight before. The first two images show two separate flights by the same bee at different stages of learning. The final image shows the probability that she utilised the same parts of the landscape on each flight. Some parts of the two flights were almost identical (the stretch from the nest to the first feeder at bottom right, and an unexpected, but very repeatable detour at the top of the image), while other legs of the journey (notably the movements between feeders in the centre of the image) changed drastically between flights.
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Click here to learn more about how I created these images.