The one-minute video is simply wondrous and it had clocked-up almost two million hits. Bees go through four distinct life cycle phases of metamorphosis: egg, larva, pupa, and adult. For a worker bee this takes 21-days, as shown in the video.
To make the video, Anand Varma got together with University of California, Davis. Given that the transformation from bee to adult takes 21-days, and the resultant video lasts a little over one minute, this gives an idea of the painstaking process that Varma went through to assemble the various images and to edit these together to make a coherent video.
According to a feature in Discovery Magazine, both Varma and the university had a serious aim with the video beyond public entertainment. They wanted to both highlight the decline in bee populations and to use the photographs to see if they could ascertain any further clues in relation to why bee numbers are falling. The studies being run at the university center on a parasite called Varroa destructor. The Varroa mite can infect bee colonies and it can kill the developing bee before it becomes can adult. Disturbingly, the mite sucks on the blood of the embryonic bee. Some biologists are of the view that mite infestation is the basis of ‘colony collapse disorder.’
Digital Journal has featured several articles on the plight of bees. For example, we highlighted a study which showed that bees prefer food laced with pesticides. This means that bees can be drawn to food laced with pesticides, leading to their death. In a related piece, new research from Europe suggests that 1 in 10 bees face extinction due to environmental changes and indiscriminate use of chemicals by farmers.
