Profile

Hi, I’m Rui Goncalves, born in the US, raised in the Portuguese culture, and have a 3-month-old British-Portugues son (he was born in Oxford). I think I’m a multinational citizen, as many of you may be.

Growing up, I was glued to the BBC wildlife programmes and gasped every time a lion or a crocodile grabbed a zebra. I’m also a big fan of comic books, and my favourite of all time is Calvin and Hobbes from Bill Waterson.

Much of growing up shaped my interests in environmental protection, sustainable food production and helping local communities with their farming practices.

I’ve been working with bees for over ten years. At first, by supporting my hobbyist uncle who thought a guy with a background in biology and environmental studies, would understand his bees better.

The first encounter with this “superorganism” caused such fascination that led me to start Zee – Honey goods, a synergetic food company merging honeybees and aromatic herbs.

Shortly after, I assisted and co-founded a local beekeeping association, created consultancy services for local farmers and was awarded an Erasmus for entrepreneurs where I met Prof. Geraldine Wright. With Prof. Wright and a group of international researchers, I helped to create a new start-up, Apix, to formulate a superfood for honeybees that aims to sustain them for longer and generate more resilient offspring.

Bees reached their limiting capacity in absorbing more stressors to their colonies – their Achilles heel is access to healthy nutrition.

Nowadays, in between diverse tasks, such as nutritional research projects, beekeeping and even entrepreneurship, are some of the positions taken in this lab.

Always happy to talk about bees.