Photographing the Real Life of Bees | National Geographic

These have been having a rough time for the last 10-12 years, and so National Geographic asked me, "Can you do a story about honeybees?" This is one of the most well-studied organisms, well-photographed organisms. Like, how am I supposed to drop in out of nowhere and try to do something that hasn't been done before? It's kind of an ambitious thing to promise National Geographic, but it's also hard to say no to them.

So, I was looking for this fresh approach to photographing bees, and I decided the best way to do that was to learn as much as I could from beekeepers themselves.

Eventually, I brought bees back to my home in Berkeley. I watched them in my backyard every day. We tend to dismiss things that are small. If you can enter a world at their scale, can that change your relationship to bees? How do I do that with a camera? Here I have a glass window into this. That's something that very few people get to see.

Okay, maybe I can use this special access I have to show bees in a new way. So, I was just trying stuff—different lighting approaches, noir, S, the traffic knowledge, Japanese animation, fiber optic lighting—and it didn't work. I noticed this bee was coming out of this brood cell, and his head was poking out, and it had gotten stuck there.

I thought, "Oh, maybe that's my opportunity to show a bee face up close and personal." It shows all the details, so I cut this chunk of comb around the bee's face. But when I zoomed in on it, I saw so many hairs; it catches all these little bits of dirt and dust.

I remembered this trick that I learned from a scientist at the USDA. She said, “Take an eyelash, glue it to the end of any little toothpick or safety pin. It's stiff enough; you can kind of comb its hairs and get the little bits of lint and dust and dirt, and you won't hurt it.” So, I took this little eyelash, and I brushed the bee's hair.

I used this technique called focus stacking, where you can take multiple images at high magnification. When you combine the parts of each one that are in focus together into a single image, you can make the whole thing sharp. You can make the whole thing in focus.

You lose a sense of scale, so all of a sudden you'd say, "Hey, wait a minute, what am I looking at? This doesn't look right." There was kind of an "aha" moment in the idea—figuring out if the idea was going to work was a little bit more complicated.

How do you connect somebody to a big vase, or what are the elements in this frame? Manipulate the contrast of the light of the shape of the lighting. Now it's eight months into this story; my editor asked me to send an update. He said, “Hey, look, you know, we're a little bit concerned about the progress of the story, and we'd like to see a new direction by next week.”

All of a sudden, I had this ultimatum. The night before I was supposed to send these photos, that's when this started coming together. I found that if I put the light behind the honeycomb, it would take on the color of the wax that the bees use.

This story, to me, is not like light and fuzzy and cute. It's complicated; it's mysterious; it's dark. When I saw this dark red glow, it made sense. But this world is burning. There is something going wrong here; there’s something dramatic.

What next? I think I said to him, "7 o'clock in the morning? I like to sleep. I've been up for days at that point."