Anand Varma Captures a Honey Bee Story | Photographer | National Geographic

After "Parasites," National Geographic asked me to do a story about the decline of honeybee populations. I was like, "Wow, they believe in me; they're ready to give me another story." It was like, "Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, great, cool. This'll be no problem." I'd done all the hard work of learning how to be a photographer with "Parasites." I got fiber optics, I got my backgrounds, I got all these cool techniques.

And so, I got a beehive in the backyard. And I'd catch a bee, and I'd put it in a dish, and I'd try to photograph it the way I'd photographed the parasites. But I was not taking very interesting pictures. It's like, the lighting for the parasites, it made sense. But when I tried to lift that approach and apply it to honeybees, it didn't make sense.

So, then I tried to photograph bees and flowers, pollinating things. And they're fine, but it doesn't make you think differently about honeybees. He would send me texts that were like this long in the middle of the night, and with a picture. And he would be like, "I wanna know what you think of this." And then the rest of it would be his own critique of it, you know? That was as long as my arm.

It was so frustrating. I hadn't yet realized that that's what photography is always like. It's a struggle to come up with a new, fresh idea every time, and it's hard every time. There's no formula. So, I decided to shake things up. I had been reading about these experiments that scientists were doing to understand the threats to honeybee health.

So, I began traveling around the country to see them. These experiments were fascinating. At one of the labs, they were trying to figure out how to breed mite-resistant bees. So, they were artificially inseminating them. You know, there's these weird needles and a cone, and the bee's kind of covered up, and I was trying to figure out a good shot of the experiment.

And then I see the scientists setting up the equipment, and as she's setting it up, I see the frame. I've been trying to photograph the instrument by itself, but as soon as her hands are there, it wasn't just a static object. It became a story where there's an action happening, a character doing something, a subject that is experiencing something.

I looked at it, and it was like opera. Scene one, act one, the bee is dead. What happened, right? And it was like a bee opera. He really took what he had done on the parasite story, and it improved dramatically. Technically, aesthetically, this was really taking that to the next level.

I had this beehive at home, and every so often you would glimpse the little larvae inside. And it kind of dawned on me that that little maggoty-looking thing, that doesn't look anything like a bee, yet somehow, at some point, it transforms. And wouldn't it be so cool to make a time-lapse video and watch that process happen?

By speeding up time, I could suddenly witness something that I'd never been able to see before, and that led me to what I'm doing now.