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(Music)

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These bees are in my backyard
in Berkeley, California.

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Until last year,
I'd never kept bees before,

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but National Geographic asked me
to photograph a story about them,

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and I decided, to be able
to take compelling images,

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I should start keeping bees myself.

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And as you may know,

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bees pollinate one third
of our food crops,

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and lately they've been having
a really hard time.

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So as a photographer, I wanted to explore
what this problem really looks like.

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So I'm going to show you
what I found over the last year.

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This furry little creature

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is a fresh young bee halfway emerged
from its brood cell,

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and bees right now are dealing
with several different problems,

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including pesticides, diseases,
and habitat loss,

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but the single greatest threat
is a parasitic mite from Asia,

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Varroa destructor.

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And this pinhead-sized mite
crawls onto young bees

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and sucks their blood.

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This eventually destroys a hive

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because it weakens
the immune system of the bees,

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and it makes them more vulnerable
to stress and disease.

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Now, bees are the most sensitive

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when they're developing
inside their brood cells,

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and I wanted to know
what that process really looks like,

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so I teamed up
with a bee lab at U.C. Davis

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and figured out how to raise bees
in front of a camera.

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I'm going to show you
the first 21 days of a bee's life

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condensed into 60 seconds.

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This is a bee egg
as it hatches into a larva,

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and those newly hatched larvae
swim around their cells

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feeding on this white goo
that nurse bees secrete for them.

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Then, their head and their legs
slowly differentiate

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as they transform into pupae.

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Here's that same pupation process,

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and you can actually see the mites
running around in the cells.

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Then the tissue in their body reorganizes

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and the pigment slowly
develops in their eyes.

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The last step of the process
is their skin shrivels up

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and they sprout hair.

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(Music)

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So -- (Applause)

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As you can see halfway
through that video,

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the mites were running around
on the baby bees,

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and the way that beekeepers
typically manage these mites

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is they treat their hives with chemicals.

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In the long run, that's bad news,

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so researchers are working
on finding alternatives

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to control these mites.

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This is one of those alternatives.

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It's an experimental breeding program
at the USDA Bee Lab in Baton Rouge,

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and this queen and her attendant bees
are part of that program.

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Now, the researchers figured out

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that some of the bees have
a natural ability to fight mites,

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so they set out to breed
a line of mite-resistant bees.

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This is what it takes
to breed bees in a lab.

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The virgin queen is sedated

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and then artificially inseminated
using this precision instrument.

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Now, this procedure allows the researchers

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to control exactly
which bees are being crossed,

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but there's a tradeoff
in having this much control.

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They succeeded in breeding
mite-resistant bees,

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but in that process, those bees
started to lose traits

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like their gentleness
and their ability to store honey,

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so to overcome that problem,

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these researchers are now collaborating
with commercial beekeepers.

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This is Bret Adee opening
one of his 72,000 beehives.

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He and his brother run the largest
beekeeping operation in the world,

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and the USDA is integrating their
mite-resistant bees into his operation

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with the hope that over time,

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they'll be able to select the bees
that are not only mite-resistant

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but also retain all of these qualities
that make them useful to us.

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And to say it like that

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makes it sound like we're manipulating
and exploiting bees,

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and the truth is, we've been doing that
for thousands of years.

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We took this wild creature
and put it inside of a box,

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practically domesticating it,

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and originally that was
so that we could harvest their honey,

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but over time we started losing
our native pollinators,

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our wild pollinators,

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and there are many places now
where those wild pollinators

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can no longer meet the pollination
demands of our agriculture,

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so these managed bees have become
an integral part of our food system.

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So when people talk about saving bees,

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my interpretation of that

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is we need to save
our relationship to bees,

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and in order to design new solutions,

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we have to understand
the basic biology of bees

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and understand the effects
of stressors that we sometimes cannot see.

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In other words, we have
to understand bees up close.

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Thank you.

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(Applause)