Abstract:

A practical guide to Bees and their keeping

(Michael Hrywniak)

Bees first diverged from wasps approximately 130 million years ago, shortly after the appearance of flowers during the early to mid Cretaceous period. Today, bees are found on every continent on Earth save Antarctica, with over 20’000 known species. The best known of these is the western honey bee, Apis Mellifera, which lives in large eusocial colonies, exhibiting some of the most complex social structures and behavioural patterns in the animal kingdom.

How is it, then, that an industrious human can usurp these social structures and bend them to their advantage? In this talk I will give a practical guide to the honey bee; a brief overview of their social life, a beehive’s lifecycle over one season, and some insight into modern beekeeping practices.

Where is the “I” in physics? And should we care?

(Will Benston)

We as physicists try to describe the world in an objective and impersonal perspective, without any discussion of experience or consciousness. This has made physics and science very effective in the past, but have we reached the limit of the usefulness of this approximation? We will discuss how a successful theory of quantum gravity might need to say something about what we are and how we interact with the universe. We will talk about how we measure observables and experience time in quantum gravity. Be ready to walk the beautifully wonderful line between crackpottery, philosophy and the foundations of physics as we talk about the “I” in physics!