Wednesday April 15th
Howler (7-11 Dawson Street, Brunswick)
Doors: 7 pm
Show: 7:30 pm
Tickets: $15 + BF – Available Now!!
3 presenters share a topic they are NERDY about while the audience shares a drink.
We are well into the Nerd Nite Melbourne 2026 season, and for this show, we will be diving head-first into: native bees, rabies, and concrete. From Australia’s unsung pollinating heroes and the world’s most metal infectious disease, to the shockingly dramatic history of the grey stuff holding civilisation together, this lineup is making science feel a little unhinged (in the best way).
So come for the facts, stay for the banter, and leave with at least three new niche obsessions and an urge to plant bee-friendly flowers, rewatch every zombie movie ever made, or stare suspiciously at the nearest footpath.
Be there. Be Square
Clancy Lester
Everything you DON’T know about bees
Description: European Honeybees get all the glory, but they’re just one species in a cast of thousands. Native bees showcase wild diversity, incredible shapes and colours, and strange behaviours that make each species a tiny evolutionary experiment. Some burrow underground. Some sleep in flowers. Some “buzz” flowers to shake pollen loose. Most don’t even make honey. Meanwhile, all of them are quietly propping up our ecosystems and food systems. These unsung heroes aren’t background insects, they’re specialist pollinators, agricultural allies, and indicators of environmental health. Yet most of us couldn’t name a single one. This talk dives into the strange and spectacular world of native bees. How they live, why they matter, and what’s at risk if they’re ignored.
Bio: Clancy is a young everyday aussie that absolutely loves native bees and everything nature. He is a doggies supporter (AFL), he love grapes, sunny days, Indigenous knowledge and his dog hotch. He hates tax bludging mining and companies, single use plastics, and windy days.
Socials: @beesandblossoms.aus (IG)
Zoe Rumble
Why Rabies is the Coolest Disease
Description: In the battle for the grand title of ‘coolest disease’, infectious maladies face steep competition. From the undead antics of viruses, to the protein-bending pranks of prions, to the batches of bacteria that leave our measly cells powerless against everything from bloat to botulism – only one can reign victorious. One disease has captured our collective imagination for millenia, inspiring everything from zombies, to werewolves, to vampires. Please, join us, as we explore the wonders and brilliance of man’s best friend’s worst enemy… Rabies.
Bio: Zoe is a veterinary nurse with a zealous passion for all things medical science. When not fending off a bite to the face from her beloved canine patients, you can find her wrangling rabbits, attempting to convince her students that medical jargon is fun, or regailing the surgical team with the fascinating history of handwashing – or perhaps the reason behind our sterile drapes being blue. With a focus on anaesthesia and lagomorph medicine, she has juggled general practice nursing with exotics medicine for the last five years, and is halfway through a teaching qualification that she plans to weaponize in the fight for gold standard rabbit care.
Socials: @zoe_isnt_a_unique_name (IG)
Jeremy Turnbul
Everything you never wanted to know about concrete
Description: Concrete is the most used human-made material on Earth. Every single second, we produce almost 1000 tonnes of it. It’s underneath us, around us, and holding everything up—and most of us have walked straight past it our entire lives. Scratch the surface though, and it gets fascinating fast. A French gardener’s flowerpot obsession changed the shape of every city in the world. Half the population still thinks about the Roman Empire every day. And somewhere in the world right now, someone is stealing a beach. Concrete is why.
Bio: Jeremy works in public health policy, a role that has absolutely nothing to do with concrete. He has a long-standing habit of becoming intensely, and sometimes unreasonably, interested in very specific things. Not the Crusades—just the Seventh Crusade. Not shipwrecks—but the Titanic in particular. It was probably inevitable, then, that at some point he would become obsessed with concrete. Not in a “I love footpaths” way, but in a “this unglamorous substance underpins civilisation” way. When he’s not disappearing down Wikipedia rabbit holes, he does enjoy more human pursuits, such as board games, fantasy sports, and the kind of video games where you sneak around looking in bins for loot.