World's smallest ad is the bee's knees

Professor Dick Moodie examines the bee's knee band

A minute advert fixed to a bee's knee is setting an historic record for its creators, Guinness World Records.

The ad is the width of a human hair

The advert, which is invisible to the naked eye, simply says Guinness World Record dot.com - the website it was designed to launch.

The knee band is the work of scientists at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Didcot, Oxfordshire, UK.

The research centre now wants to find a British bee-owner to offer his bees' knees to act as miniature billboards for its campaign.

Stewart Newport, keeper of the records at Guinness, said: "On a day-to-day basis we handle the claims and evidence of the most amazing facts and feats.

Professor Ted Blatshford fine-tunes his work

"We knew we had to have something pretty extraordinary given the nature of our business. Guinness World Records is all about taking things to extremes."

The advert was created initially by evaporated gold layered on to a piece of film through a stencil. The stencil was then removed and the film mounted on a silicon band and fitted to the leg of a bee.

The ad measures just 100 microns by 100 microns, no bigger than the width of a human hair which is 40-100 microns wide. The delicate process of making and attaching the ad took half a day to complete.

The effort breaks the existing record for the smallest advert which was a 17mm by 12mm half-page ad in the world's smallest newspaper, an edition of Brazilian weekly Vossa Senhoria published in 1999.