Buzzy bees at OIST Science festival 2018
Yesterday was the very famous OIST Science festival, and this year again our bees and lab members made the show for guests coming from all over Okinawa! For this 9th edition, OIST welcomed more than 4000 guests, and we enjoyed having kids and adults asking tons of questions and rocking our activities. We also felt very lucky to be featured among the most popular booths and we were crowded all day!
Same as for the past two years, we had observation beehives 
in a display, and you could learn all about the hive life with our superstar Miyuki-san! You could see and touch what you can find inside a hive (wax, pollen, bee bread and honey) but also observed bee parasites like the wax moth and mites with the excellent guidance of Rob and Tracy. How about playing to the updated version of the EcoEvo quest 2.0 and learn about our research with the amazing Qiu-chan and our volunteer Tanaka-san? Finally, one new activity was to show your interest in honey bee by crafting your own set of antenna and using your imagination with Vienna-chan (such a success that we ran out of material too quickly!)
We hope to continue this tradition as it is essential for us to also share our research widely outside of the scientific community and especially to Okinawan. Besides we get to learn new Japanese words and meet so many people :D ! Who knows maybe in a few years, OIST will welcome future students who were inspired by such scicomm event?
Here are some pictures of this year event and you can even check OIST Instagram photo contest #oist:
And some pictures from last year:
