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(Music)
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These bees are in my backyard
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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
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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,
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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 the 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 UC 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 larva
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swim around their cells
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feeding on this white goo
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that nurse bees secrete for them.
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Then, their head and their legs
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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
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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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So 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
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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 bee hives.
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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
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their mite-resistant bees
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into his operation
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with the hope that over time,
they'll be able to select
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the bees that are not only mite-resistant
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but also retain all of these qualities
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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
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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 bees
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and understand the effects
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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)