ABOUT THIS SITE
The original purpose of the site was to provide
information about bumblebees, and hopefully, encourage people to appreciate
them.
It was started in 1996, the year that I graduated from Aberdeen University. I would have
liked to go on studying bumblebees, but there was no funding for a PhD, and I
was reluctant to go elsewhere for family reasons.
So, in case I
forgot all I had learned, and because the more I studied bumblebees the fonder
of them I became, I felt I should try to pass on what little I knew. At the
same time I had just learned HTML, so the Internet and a web site were the
ideal solution.
In the early
days all the pages were written in straight HTML; I did not have an editor. In
1997, partly to show off my prowess, and partly to keep up with web site
fashion, I put the pages into frames. I had grandiose plans to have a cutting
edge web site. Then I got an email from a teacher in Africa asking me why I'd
changed my pages, and telling me his school had only very limited access to the
Internet, and the frames were making it difficult for his pupils. Well this
brought me right back down to earth. My other emails had been mainly from US
schools, and none had complained about download times or access. So from that
day forward I have tried to keep the pages simple.
In the early days I received quite a lot of emails - some about bumblebees, and others that were clearly not about bumblebees at all, but about other creepy crawlies. It was then that I decided to expand the site and set up the invertebrate section. Then a little while later I got a little fed up of students just copying me their homework question and expecting an answer yesterday, and also the number of teachers across the world who set the exact same questions again and again. Much of this information came from the statistics Google provided about what had been entered into the search box. So I set about answering some of the questions, and also dug out some of my old notebooks, and set up the homework answers section.
