Tales From the Hive

To adequately show the inner workings of a bee colony, Nova's crew developed custom macro lenses and a special bee studio for Nova: Tales From the Hive. Once the equipment was in place, cameras captured rarely seen images from the life of a bee: the queen's "wedding flight," a struggle between rivals for the queenship, and the "waggle" dance (in which the scout bees convey the exact location of nectar to a group of attentive bees). The highly social world of bees is revealed, as they share in the gathering of food, communication, shelter construction, and defense.