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Work With Us

Do you have a passion for invertebrates, food, farming or nature or always wondered what it would be like to work or volunteer with us? Then please do check below regularly to see if we have any positions available!

Bug Farm Foods Ltd

There are currently no roles available within Bug Farm Foods.

Grub Kitchen Ltd

There may be front of house and kitchen roles available. Please e-mail info@grubkitchen.com for more information.

Dr Beynon’s Bug Farm Ltd

Job title: Bug Farm Volunteer

Days per week: Flexible

Short/long term: Flexible

Paid/voluntary: Unpaid – volunteer positions

We are often able to offer fantastic opportunities for students/early-career naturalists to get into the world of applied entomology/invertebrate zookeeping/ecology/nature recovery/outreach in a busy and vibrant visitor attraction and research centre. We also run weekly conservation/land management volunteering sessions.

Click here for an example of the volunteer role description.

To register your interest, please send us an e-mail or cover letter, detailing why you would like to volunteer with us, and a CV to info@thebugfarm.co.uk

Application deadline: Rolling deadlines.

Dr Beynon’s Bug Farm Ltd – Research projects

We also have the following research opportunities available. These projects would suit students carrying out undergraduate, MSc or PhD research or students/early career scientists wanting to take on an independent research project to gain experience in the field and build their CV. Dr Beynon did this instead of doing a MSc before doing her doctorate!

Research project

Project title: Marsh fritillary butterfly reintroduction

Approximate duration: TBC

Dates: TBC – late 2024- 2025 start

Suitable for: PhD or possibly MSc project, or both

Paid/voluntary: Unpaid – we would be happy to look into funding opportunities with you and a university supervisor

This is part of a wider project looking at bringing back the marsh fritillary butterfly to the St Davids peninsula. More information on the background to the project can be found at the following project pages: Bringing Back the Marsh Fritillary to the St Davids Peninsula, Connecting the Commons and Common Connections.

We would like to develop a programme of research around a potential marsh fritillary butterfly reintroduction to the St Davids peninsula in 2025. While we would encourage students to develop their own programme of research around the project, we are especially interested in questions related to metapopulation dynamics.

Click here for more information on the research project.

Additional research/conservation/volunteer roles

We have a number of long-term conservation and research fieldwork experiments running and are interested in finding students who may like to carry out their research projects on them. These include:

  • Plastic-free and herbicide-free woodland creation.
  • Assessing the costs and benefits of eDNA soil and water sampling compared to conventional ecological surveying across the St Davids peninsula (data have already been collected): See film on the Common Connections page.
  • Cataloguing a historic global butterfly collection and comparing species distributions with today (winter project).
  • Bumblebee and butterfly surveys: We are looking for regular volunteers to assist with our surveys across the St Davids peninsula.
  • Assessing the efficacy of toad gulley ladders in reducing toad mortality – see the BHS website for more information. We may be able to offer this as a student project, but the start-date of this work has not yet been finalised.
  • Assessing how horse owners can reduce the environmental impacts of antiparasitic treatments: We have a strong collaboration of vets and ecologists committed to addressing this issue and may be able to collaborate on a student project on this topic. If you are interested in this topic, or on non-target impacts of antiparasitics in animals more generally, have a look at the bottom two fact sheets on the Dung Beetles Direct page.
  • Fancy carrying out a research project with us but want to design it yourself? Have a look at our Common Connections project to have an idea of some of the data we collect In particular, the list of reports should give you an idea of the data that is available.

Key information

All roles are offered to people aged 18yrs+. We have a small number of work experience placements available each year for young people, for which there is usually a waiting list. If you are interested in work experience, please send us an e-mail to express interest.

Accommodation

Dr Beynon may be able to separately offer subsidised accommodation in a (beautiful) shared staff/student house St Davids for a small number of staff/volunteers/students. If you are interested in accommodation, please get in touch with sarah@thebugfarm.co.uk as soon as possible and we will give you more information, as spaces are extremely limited.