Saving Bumblebees Became This Photographer's Mission | Short Film Showcase

[Music] I started this journey chasing one ghost and ended up taking a lesson from another. We humans defend the things we value. That's why I traveled halfway across the country looking for [Music] bees. I can't remember what first attracted me to insects. I was always shy, and I wasn't very good at sports or other socially acceptable things. I was the kid who was good at science and art, and even though I've got kids of my own now, not much has changed. I've been training all my life for this; that's why I'm still dressed like a 10-year-old boy.

My name is Clay Bolt. I'm a nature photographer, and my favorite subjects in the world are the little animals that most people ignore. I did some reading and discovered that there are almost 4,000 species of wild native bees in North America. Honeybees, the ones everyone is so worried about, actually don't belong here. Europeans brought them over with cows and chickens and all of our other domesticated animals. We know almost nothing about most of the native species, and so photographing native bees became my obsession.

The rusty patched bumblebee has not been seen in the park since 2003, despite repeated efforts to find [Music] it. We do have records of it occurring all the way back to the 1930s, and so we're not entirely sure why we're seeing the decline, especially in a protected area like the national [Music] park. There was a stuffed passenger pigeon next to me, sort of staring off into space with its glass eyes. That was the most numerous bird on the continent, but we exterminated it before we even realized what we were doing. I wondered whether the rusty patched bumblebee, like the passenger pigeon, was another ghost in the making.

There are still some rusty patched bumblebee populations in the Upper Midwest, and whether I could photograph them or not, I needed to know they were still out there. A biologist named Rich Hatfield suggested that we meet up in Madison, Wisconsin, to try and find the bee. This is a species that used to be one of the most common bumblebees in the eastern United States, and now its relative abundance has dropped by 90 to 95%. So, a once common animal has become incredibly rare.

In February of 2013, the Xerces Society filed a petition with the Fish and Wildlife Service to have the rusty patched bumblebee listed as an endangered species, and under the law, the Fish and Wildlife Service has to reply within 90 days with what's called a 90-day finding. They just have to respond and say the species warrants a further investigation by the Fish and Wildlife Service, or it doesn't. When I met up with Rich more than 900 days after the petition was filed, there still hadn't been a 90-day finding on the rusty patched bumblebee. If the agency responsible for endangered species couldn't be bothered to respond, then the bee was going to need some other allies.

If I could photograph the bee, then at least people could see what we stood to lose. It's so [Music] perfect! I photographed the rusty patch feeding and flying and resting for the night. One of the really special moments, even though it's not the best photo I got, was finding a giant one of next year's queens, like a fuzzy little symbol of hope for the future.

What good are insects, to start with? You can answer that question in a couple of different ways. One is you can try to figure out what good are they doing for me. Now, what is the value of that biodiversity? I think we can all agree that having zero species probably is not a good situation to have. Having lots of species—well, is that better than just having a few? On the one hand, I completely understand that it's difficult to value something that seems so detached from our everyday lives. On the other hand, if you don't need to put that value on it, that also says something about how you value other life in general.

I'll never forget the first time I put a beetle under the microscope and looked at it up close. I thought these are the most beautiful things that I've ever seen. That was good enough for me; I didn't need to put any value on it. They were just beautiful. We spend so much time and effort making life better for ourselves. The least that we can do is make life possible for this [Music] bee. People everywhere share a desire to feel wonder. We gravitate toward rare, beautiful things, and we've got one right here. The rusty patched bumblebee really is an amazing little animal.

Leopold said our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by [Music] language. Do we have it in us to save the rusty patched bumblebee? I think we do. Here is so hard to make things a little better; all we are saying is step forward, step forward. Oh no, no! [Music]