(Photo Credit: USGS)
Few of us spend time thinking about bees and many of us spend time trying to avoid them. Despite needing them for food production and despite them, according to the White House adding more than "$15 billion in value to agricultural crops each year", they're not a topic that is often at the forefront of our daily discussions. They are also rarely creatures we get close enough to to examine and understand.
But one man, biologist Sam Droege, is changing the way we see bees by providing an extraordinary photographic look at them. Droege, head of the U.S. Geological Survey's (USGS) Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab, has been documenting the North American bee population since 2001. There are, according to Droege, roughly 4,000 species of North American bees, though many of them are too small and too passive (they don't sting) to ever be noticed.
To create a thorough inventory, Droege realized he needed photographs that would allow him to carefully study each bee, but when he first started shooting (with a point and shoot), the pictures lacked necessarily macro details.
In 2010, Droege was contacted by a specialist at the U.S. Army who had created a new photo system that would come to change the way Droege shoots his images. In an interview with National Geographic earlier this year, Droege explained the importance of the development: "The pictures are so detailed, they create a virtual museum for these specimens," he says. And now, "the general, general public" is fascinated by the images. He continues, "Once you blow [the bees] up to the size of a German shepherd…people start paying attention."
Have a look at these unbelievable photos and check out the rest of the collection on the USGS photostream.
