About me

Francis Ratnieks grew up in south east England and as a boy spent a lot of time chasing butterflies and moths. He began his Biology BSc at Sussex University in 1971 but dropped out. He then spent 8 years living in Ireland, initially in Co. Kerry where he made and sold jewelry on the street and worked on fishing boats, later enrolling in the University of Ulster in Coleraine where he took a BSc in Ecology and where his enthusiasm for insects resurfaced. From Ulster, by way of Panama, he went to the Department of Entomology at Cornell University where he took MS and PhD degrees in honey bee biology and also spent time doing research in Mexico.  He then did postdoctoral research on honey bees and social insects at the University of California, Berkeley and Riverside campuses, and taught in Denmark. In 1995 he returned to the UK, to Sheffield University. In 2008 he returned to Sussex where he is the UK's only Professor of Apiculture and is head of the Laboratory of Apiculture and Social Insects. He has studied honey bees and social insects on all continents (except Antarctica, where they don’t live) and given seminars in two foreign languages. He has published approximately 200 research articles on honey bees and social insects, and has also written many popular and outreach articles. He has found that the most useful things he learned at school were woodwork (for making bee hives) and algebra (for the mathematical modelling social evolution and behaviour).

This is a photo of me (2007) beside a large fig tree on the campus of the University of Sao Paulo at Riberao Preto. The late William Hamilton studied the fig wasps on this tree. 

This is a photo of me (right), my brother Nick (left), and also friends Mark and David Parmenter (trying to steal my insect net) taken at the Ridgeway in the Berkshire Downs on a trip to chase insects (1964).