It begins as something that looks like a grub gorging on goo, but in the span of just a minute, a wriggling, jiggling, hairy baby bee emerges. Okay, in real time what you're seeing here is really the first 21 days in the life of the insect, but Anand Varma sped up his footage in the video seen here to capture the strange and marvelous birth of a bee.
Varma was contracted by National Geographic to photograph bees, and so he began keeping them in his backyard in Berkeley, CA. In the second video below, beginning at about the 1:55, he explains the metamorphosis happening before our eyes at time-lapse pace. The larvae eat the good, which is provided by nurse bees. They grow into pupae, their body parts differentiate, and their eyes get pigment and grow darker. "The last step of the process is, their skin shrivels up and they sprout hair."
Watch:
Source: Kottke
Andrew's from Nebraska. His work has also appeared in Discover, The Awl, Scientific American, Mental Floss, Playboy, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn with two cats and a snake.
