Club Meeting - Derek Mitchell

Derek initially set out on a career in mechanical engineering but switched to the world of microelectronics via physics and thus later to telecommunications and now back to mechanical engineering with a perhaps surprising application area - honey bees!

‘So after a break of 40 years I returned to mechanical engineering, all because my wife took up bee keeping and the hives bee keepers used were at odds with what I knew about heat transfer and what bee keepers told me about honey bees. I thought I could build better bee hives and so started out trying to find the requirements of the honey bees, and found out that nobody knew in terms that made engineering sense. So I had to find out for myself.’