Polly largely ignored the King’s offering, prompting the monarch to jokingly ask her keeper whether the tortoise was on a diet.
The Queen was so entranced by the animals that the King had to call “Darling!” several times before she eventually followed him out of the enclosure.
In the Tiny Giants habitat, the King heard about efforts to protect Partula tree snails from extinction, while the Queen viewed the Zoo’s western honeybee colony.
The King helped staff paint the snails with “snail polish” so they could be easily tracked in the wild.
“I shall do it very slowly,” he joked, before placing a small dot on the top of the shell. “Does it come off eventually?” he asked.
The monarch was eventually rejoined by his wife, who proudly told him: “I’ve just named a queen bee ‘Camilla’.”
While the tour was the King’s first as ZSL’s patron, he originally visited the zoo as a one-year-old to see Brumas, a newborn polar bear cub.
Since 1828, when the world’s first scientific zoo was founded in Regent’s Park, every monarch has been patron of the ZSL.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.telegraph.co.uk ’
