Have you ever seen a baby bee? Unlikely, as encased deep inside a beehive, bees use honeycombs to store pollen, honey, and incubate their eggs, larvae, and pupae. Photographer Anand Varma carefully created a temporary mini-beehive in his outdoor workshop to reveal the secret lives of bees.
This hypnotic time-lapse video captured for National Geographic shows the development of bee larvae into fully-grown bees.
Varma’s mini-project was not without struggle, especially for this amateur apiarist. Amidst the first few tries of setting up the hive, Varma managed to capture an ant infestation that made a succulent meal of the bee larvae. But if at first you don’t succeed, try and try again. Over a period of six months, he carefully adjusted the humidity and temperature until he got it just right.
“Once it started to work, I was like, 'Oh my god, this is going to be the coolest thing ever if I can show every part of this process,'” said Varma to National Geographic.
In a natural setting, a queen bee would lay eggs, each of which would attach to a cell with a mucous strand. Within the egg, the digestive system, nervous system and outer covering will form. The egg will hatch into a larva after three days, and will then feed on honey and royal jelly delivered by worker honey bees. At this stage, the larva looks like a grain of rice with a small mouth since it has not yet formed antennae, eyes, legs or wings. They continue to feed until they grow into adult workers, queens or drones.
[H/T National Geographic]
