Stunning pictures of bees show the insects as you've never seen them before - with fluffy 'hair' and stained-glass wings
These incredibly detailed pictures of bees will make you think twice about swatting away the stinger plaguing your late summer picnic.
Sam Droege is the head of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Bee Inventory and Monitoring Laboratory in Beltsville, Maryland and for the past six or seven years he and his team of about eight people have been photographing bees and other insects.
They are all free to view and download on the U.S. Geological Survey’s Flickr page – something Mr Droege is proud of.
‘We really like the idea that all of these pictures are public domain, anyone can grab them for free,’ Mr Droege told MailOnline.
‘They don’t actually have to attribute them to us. I think it shows that government tax dollars are being used wisely.’
But it wasn’t until around 2010 that the quality of the images got to where they are now.
For years they used simple point and shoot cameras, but then the army shared their technique for capturing insects using macro photography.
Mr Droege says that the army developed the technique when they were dealing with insect infestations and other problems in remote areas.
Macro-photography allowed them to get a high-quality picture and send it to experts for identification.
The macro photography allows you to see every detail of the insect up close without needing to use a microscope.
So far, Mr Droege says he has yet to find an insect that looks ugly when it’s blown up. Even cockroaches look beautiful with their shimmering coloring and sculpturing.
Currently the USGS has posted 1,200 pictures of bees and other insects to its Flickr page.
The pictures are taken using a ‘pretty standard’ Canon 5D II with a 65mm macro lens.
Mr Droege says that it takes about two to four hours to complete one picture, from washing and prepping the bee to photoshopping the image.
The bees are placed on a pin against a black backdrop and shot mugshot-style, from the front and the side.
Many bees don’t make the cut because of ‘bad hair’
Several shots are taken with the camera and then stacked into one image using a special software which creates the detailed macro-images. The images can be blown up to five feet by eight feet without pixelating.
They use a black backdrop instead of a lighter background to let the intricate patterns on the wings show.
The bees looks strikingly life-like once the pin is edited out. Since insects have no internal skeleton, their exoskeletons harden and don’t change much after death.
Mr Droege says taking pictures of the bees help in identifying the thousands of species of bees across North America. Of the 4,000 species, there are still 500 that have no scientific name.
So Mr Droege and his team have been putting together an online catalog of bee species and they have already identified 2,000 different species.
But since the photos are up for anyone to use on Flickr, they’ve also been taken for non-scientific purposes.
Since they don’t require permission to take, Mr Droege says he doesn’t know the full extent of how they are being shared by the laymen, but he has been able to partially track their whereabouts with site traffic monitors.
One day they got a lot of hits from a graphic design group that was using one picture of a giant cricket hunter as the basis for a project on creating monster graphics.
Mr Droege says he likes that people who aren’t their ‘typical audience’ are using the images and says he doesn’t want to be an ‘arbiter’ for how they are used.
One of the most entertaining uses he’s come across recently was a post to the Reddit page ‘WoahDude’ which describes it’s content as ‘the best links to click while you’re stoned.’
Mr Droege says he got a kick out of all the comments, many heavy with profanity.
‘Looks like pokemons or some crazy s*** like that. I like it!’ one user wrote.
‘Damn nature, you scary’ added another.
One user wrote that they looked like ‘some insect crime-fighting task force.’
A few Redditers even started to get curious about what ‘breed’ the bees were, which Mr Droege liked to see.
He says that after two days up on Reddit, the picture set received 200,000 page views which is a number the USGS’s Flickr page didn’t reach until over 1,000 pictures were up.
Mr Droege and his team continues to photograph bees daily, and it’s something he enjoys so much that he continues to photoshop even on his days off.
‘I have the best job in the world and I get to look at these things all the time. I am completely honored to be doing this for the public,’ he said
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