Saturday, September 14, 2013

Bee Porn

From Smithsonian:




Drone bees live with one purpose in mind: mating with a queen. When they’re lucky enough to achieve it, it only lasts a few seconds, and they die immediately afterward, because their penis and abdominal tissues are violently ripped from the body as part of the process.
Thus, for a drone bee, those few seconds of mating are the peak of existence. And here are those blissful seconds, captured in slow-motion.
The clip is from the new documentary More Than Honeyreleased last week, which explores the wondrous world of honeybees and Colony Collapse Disorder, the mysterious affliction that’s causing U.S. bee populations to plummet.
To get shots like this, the filmmakers used mini-helicopters equipped with ultra-high speed cameras (the clip above has 300 frames-per-second) and a so-called “bee-whisperer,” who carefully tracked the activity of 15 different hives so the crew could move them to a filming studio when a particular event was imminent.
I can't decide if the drone bee is worse off or better off than me.  The zoom camera work looks like CGI.  I'd love to see how they were able to center a bee in the frame with that mini-helicopter. 

No comments:

Post a Comment