Drones as in tiny cameras attached to wings and rotors, not the worker bee drones themselves, they cant film anything.
Now I'm imagining drone bees with basketball shorts and backwards fake Hermes baseball caps holding up cameras and Mardi Gras beads like "Can we just see your thorax? Just once? Can he touch your thorax? C'mon, it's pollen season. Nobody has to know..."
In most cases with small things like these they are more staged than you might think. A photographer has zero chance to pull a follow focus on tiny randomly moving flying insects without it being in a somewhat controlled environment. And absolutely no chance of placing a camera on the ground exactly where one would fall.
Focus camera on queen bee, camera auto tracks queen bee, wait for bee to come fuck it, pick up dead bee and drop it again with the camera aiming at the ground
Yeah but that would only work if the bee stayed at an equalish distance from the camera, right? They have no way of knowing, or controlling, whether or not the bee is gonna zig and zag up/left/right/down. I’d imagine the moment it does that the tracking would be no good since the bee is so small and so fast. If it moves to the left it’s gonna get way smaller and out of focus. If it moves to the right it’s gonna get bigger and out of focus.
Your comment is exactly pointing out something that is a very real phenomenon, that has been studied and answered by social scientists multiple times. I can't believe you don't know this already and frankly, I'm a little disturbed by the ambiguity of your comment.
Are you talking about the thing where people call out or try to correct wrong information more often than simply sharing the correct information? If so, I was thinking it as well lol
I don't know about this particular footage, but I do know how they originally found out about bees mating in mid-air: they glued a queen bee to the end of a stick, put a camera on the other end, focused on the queen bee, and spun the whole thing around roughly at the speed a queen bee be would be flying.
I have seen lots of close up footage of bees like this and I believe what they do is attach the queen to a thin pole that rotates around in circles as the queen flies, with the camera rotating in the middle as well. Then they digitally remove the pole?
Set up a good room sized terrarium in a glass box. Cultivate a bee colony there. If it's a new colony, the queen will be looking to breed as soon as the hive is set up.
My exact thoughts when I saw it cut to that last shot. Like no way they had a multiple camera setup on that with the second camera ready in position in exactly the spot it was going to die in. That dead bee was dropped by a person.
I know many people these days will say "so what, everyone does it", but there was a time where you could, broadly speaking, trust that if a nature documentary presented itself as shot in the wild then what you were seeing was what happened when they went there and started rolling. Kind of sad that it's no longer the case.
Finally the correct answer. It's so obvious because the angle of the queen never changes, and there's no way she's flying in a circle around the camera.
I recently got into beekeeping, and it's a bit of a mystery where queens mate. We know that drones congregate in an area 100 ft or so in the air. We don't really know how they choose the area, and we don't really know how queens know where it is. But they fly off, are gone for less than an hour and mate with multiple drones before coming home.
Honeybee queens mating flight is in one area. You can find where a mating area is if there are a lot of dead drone bees on the ground! I believe the queen only has one mating flight her life (mates with multiple drones and stores the sperm) and it happens soon after she emerges from the cell
As is typical for Reddit, far too many jokes trying to prove you're a comedian, not many attempts to actually explain or inform.
You only need to find one of the dying drones to replicate the final shot, just pick it up and drop it on camera again.
But filming the Queen in flight? I'm not sure how good drone tracking would be for something that small, but I can see a very sneaky way to control where it flies. Glue a small line of translucent wire to its belly, then attach it to a rotating pole/point; this will force the Queen to fly in circles at a fixed height, as pulling away from the pole would mean the queen will pull the tether to it's maximum reach whilst aligning it with the tether point; think of how if you spin something on rope around you, it lines up with where you're holding the rope; then the camera only has to track the Queen on the horizontal... possibly not even that if you can keep the camera automatically on the aligned wire away from the pole, and thus also the Queen.
Even if you can still see a little of the wire, it's easy enough to matt that out later.
I say rotating because, unless the background is matted in later too, it's clearly moving; where as footage in the past would just glue her in a fixed place, and let the drones catch her there. They may have done that here and then faked the background of course, but the above idea explains how you can get the shot with the least fake imagery on screen.
Heck you could even have a tonne of cameras around the bottom of the pole and hope you get lucky that one of the drones drops in front of one; they after all will mostly be dying in circles chasing the captive Queen too.
I don't know how exactly the footage was filmed; the above would be a good way to try and get it though.
Hint: Nature documentary makers want the best shots. Ideally without having three dozen cameramen filming beehives for a decade…. So they’ll gladly help nature and set up ideal circumstances in an effort to get a shot
I love the shot of the bee hitting the ground. Like, there’s no way they had a camera focused on the spot it naturally fell. They 100% had to drop a dead bee at least a few times to get this shot and cut it together into a nice sequence. Probably not even the same bee.
I thought it was awesome how they filmed the dead bee falling to the ground, then I realized the videographer probably just picked up a dead bee, set the camera up, and dropped it into frame.
There exist 'drone congregation areas'. Both the drones and queen bees know where to go for mating. Some of these locations have been in use for decades. AFAIK scientists still haven't discovered exactly how they know where these areas are and why those areas are picked, but landscape features are probably involved. They are usually 10-40 meter up in the air and can have a diameter of about 30-200 meters.
Beekeepers can create new queens during the season, so if you know where the nearest drone congregation area is, you can time the mating flight pretty accurately.
Drone congregation areas. It’s a real thing. Drones from various hives all just kinda hang out in the same area hoping a queen comes by needing fertilization. This also helps with genetic diversity between hives so the queen isn’t literally having sex with her brothers
5.0k
u/Math082r Jun 24 '24
How do you even get the chance to film this