Winter is a quiet season for beekeepers, so what better time to make yourself a steaming mug of cocoa and settle down to two great podcasts about bees!

The first podcast is a public discussion held at LSE by the Forum for European Philosophy, titled Hive Minds: Collective Intelligence in Humans and Other Animals. The panelists are Christian List (philosopher, LSE), Elli Leadbeater (social insect biologist, Royal Holloway), and Larissa Conradt (evolutionary theorist, Max Planck Institute for Human Development).

A swarm of bees (Image credit: Nilfanion, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons)

Leadbeater opens the discussion brilliantly, asking us to picture a swarm of honey bees who have just left a hive. So now they are clustering on a tree branch, with about three days to find a new home before they run out of food. Scout bees fly off in all directions looking for nesting sites with certain desirable features – large…