In this YouTube video, beekeeping expert Laurence Edwards (Black Mountain Honey) takes viewers inside a calm colony of bees while collaborating with world‑class macro photographer Stuart Wood. The narrative follows a hands‑on hive inspection: locating and handling queen bees (including clipping wings, minimizing stress, and repositioning them for photography), dealing with unexpected challenges such as a wasp intrusion and multiple stings, and setting up a macro rig to capture extreme close‑ups of hive elements. Edwards and Wood document a range of hive subjects—queen cells, drones, eggs, larvae, royal jelly, pollen, honey, and bee behaviors like trophallaxis and the waggle dance. The video also highlights health concerns observed in the hive, notably a drone afflicted with deformed‑wing virus transmitted by varroa mites. Throughout, Wood’s macro techniques, lighting, and post‑processing presets are showcased, culminating in a gallery of striking, high‑magnification images, including an unexpected horsefly macro shot. The content blends practical beekeeping insights, photography education, and vivid visual storytelling, emphasizing both the beauty and the technical challenges of macro work inside a beehive.
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Today I'm going to show you inside a beehive like you've never seen before. Now I have got a wonderfully calm colony of bees here, but I have also got a world-class macro photographer. In this video, I'm going to show you how Stuart Wood puts together these pictures, applies his presets to make the images pop, but just give you an overall look inside this beehive. You have never seen anything like this. Oh, oh, she's gone again. It's gone a little bit red. Oh no, Stuart, Stuart just got stung there. So this colony here is on double brood, but there's a queen excluder in the middle, which means that this top box is not gonna have the queen in, and she is gonna be underneath this queen excluder here. So I've got a wasp. That's the first wasp I've seen jumping on the frame this year. Oh, I do not like it when the wasps come in. So I'm just going through all the frames here, trying to find the queen. Never straightforward finding the queen, especially when someone's waiting for you to find the queen. But there we go, we have found her. Queen is on that frame there. You can see big green and blue spot, but we want to go super, super close up on this queen. Ah, now that's the problem. Where did she go? Oh, well, everyone stay dead still because she'll be there and she can't fly because she's clipped. There she is. I see her, I see her. There we go. No, no, no, we leave those bits in. Yeah, we got to do it. Got to have the full picture, right? So let's put her on there. And there we go. She's there. Yeah. Has she gone again? There she is. So we've dropped her twice. I think that's probably gonna be it for this queen. I don't wanna put her through too much. So last thing I wanna do is kind of put the queens through any stress. She's fallen off twice, so I'm gonna get this one now back into the hive and leave her to it. So this queen has done her duty. We're gonna place her now back on the frame. You can see no damage done. She's happy to go back in. And there she is back inside the hive. So I'm just gonna leave Stuart to it. He is having lots and lots of fun there. Going inside, real super close-ups. This is the thing: I can never get even this close up. So let's have a little preview from what Stuart's doing here. Let's go close in and okay, you can't really see it there on the camera. I'll flash it up on the screen. Take a look at how close that work is though. The detail is exceptional. So you know me at Black Mountain Honey. I'll always show you when stuff goes wrong or stuff happens. And what happened there is we were doing some pictures and obviously not got my veil up, and I just took a sting. the back of the neck. Pretty standard for me at Black Mountain Honey. Stuart was very excited and he said, oh, let me take a picture of that. So you will not be able to see it on this camera here unless I kind of come out a little bit. Maybe on the tip of my finger there, there is a bee sting. Stuart took some photos of this sting and this is what it looks like. Oh my goodness. So there's my queen on there, an Obsidian queen this time. I'm going to take her off. We'll put her onto the same stand and see if we can replicate those shots. Ah, see, she's just flying off. So it's proving very challenging to get the queens to stay put on there. That one there didn't have a clipped wing, so she's just used to flying around. I didn't want to clip the wing just for this, so she flew off. We got a couple of pictures of her, but we didn't get her in the setup here. It's no great loss. We move on to the next one. We just want to get some cool photos. So we're going to change things up a little bit. At the moment, I've been picking up the queens and taking them maybe 3 or 4 meters away just to keep Christine and Stuart out of the way of the bees. They're fully protected now. So what we're going to try and do is clamp the setup to the side of the beehive So then I can just pick the queen up, put her 6 or 7 inches away, take the pictures, and then put her back in. I think that's going to be the easier way for everyone. So if any beekeepers are watching this and thinking, what's going on with all the small colonies? They're purposely small. They've had splits taken out of them, and we're just building them back up over winter. So I found the queen. We're going to get a couple of shots of her on the frame, and then we're going to try and place her onto the stand. So there she is. Oh, she's gone as well. There we go. So this is proving way more challenging than I thought it was going to be. Young queens are much more flighty. A lot of these aren't clipped as well. So we're pivoting over now to some more established colonies, not just 1 or 2 frame nucs, big strong colonies where the queen should be more calm and hopefully she won't fly off. So I'm going to go in that one right above me now and see if I can get a hold of her. if we can find the queen. So we will, we'll take the whole frame down this time. So we're going to do it slightly different. I'm going to take the frame to the stand this time. Right, so we'll try it a little bit different this time. Maybe we'll just let the queen walk out onto it and see if we can trick her. Trick her. That's not worked. There you go. Sorry, I got her. It's all right, we got her again. Yeah, she just did that little pause, didn't she? Oh, nice on the inside. Look at that. So the queen has done a fine job there. Just going to leave her to find her way back to her bees. She knows where she's going. And there we go. She's happy again. Straight back in and I'll get her back into the beehive. So we've got some fantastic images of queens there. Job done completely. And I will show you the very best photos of the queens at the end of this video. But before we get to that, we need to go in and take some pictures of other stuff within the beehive. I'm talking pollen, honey, eggs, larvae, royal jelly, bees, drones, worker brood, the lot. Let's get inside and do a super macro close-up inside the beehive. I am so excited. So we're going to go back inside this hive here, my calmest hive in the apiary. I did get stung by these ones here, but they are pretty chilled. So first box, there's going to be lots of bees, there's going to be lots of brood, maybe not that many queen cells. But in the bottom box, there are definitely queen cells, swarm cells, and we're going to take a real close-up look inside now. So a picture of the bees on that's quite nice because this is a queen excluder. Oh, you see them kissing? So that's when they're sharing, like they're basically transferring fluids from one mouth to another. So one bee might have gone out and collected some nectar, and then it sends it to the other one or gives it to the other one through kissing. Check out this one here. So that is a drone. So we just found a drone with severe deformed wing virus. It is a virus that's transmitted by the varroa mite. And if you don't know what a varroa mite looks like, I have got the perfect man to show you. So we're going to find some varroa in here as well. Oh no. Oh dear. Yeah, so the first like 15 seconds are intense. Yeah, so— oh no. So sorry, Stuart. Stuart, Stuart just got stung there. How'd you feel? I took your sting out. Let's have a look. Let's make sure I got it all out. So Stuart's taking a look inside the hive close up. Some beautiful wax structures, all of the bees on the top. We don't need the sunlight out because we've got a really good macro lens and a nice diffuser with a flash. I'm just going to leave Stuart to it. I'm going to take some frames out for him, show him inside. Eggs, larvae, royal jelly. We're going to get some real close-up shots. I'm so excited. So you can see a few bees on here doing the waggle dance. It's their way of communicating to the other bees where the really good food is. forage is available. They're saying it's in this direction, and the duration of the waggle indicates how far away it is. What an amazing creature. So what you'll see down here now, see that I've shaken out a lot of nectar, so you're going to have bees there with nectar on them, little drops of nectar, and that's a— that'd be a lovely little macro shot. Nice, down into the hive. So Stuart just had a really nice idea there, shooting down into the hive and using the Backdrop to separate the bees as much as you can. There's a lot going on in these images. We're inside the hive with 20,000 or 30,000 bees, so the job of the macro photography is to try and isolate things. That's what we're going to do now. Hello! Oh yeah, Stuart has just shown me one of them. Oh my goodness, I cannot believe it. The separation is what makes it so brilliant. I'll get another thing here, but see That cell there. Yep. Can you see there's a little tiny tick-tack at the bottom? Yeah, that is called an egg. Oh, it's like a little rice. Like a little grain of rice, exactly. So we're trying to get a photo here of this swarm cell on the side of this frame. Just going to open it up just so we can get an angle on that larva inside. So then that is a larva. So that's one of the larvae before, but turbocharged with royal jelly. So royal jelly is like a secretion that only the young bees can produce, and it's how they turn young larvae into queen bees. So we've moved underneath the shelter now. It's a little bit windy and balancing queens on rolled up bits of foundation is a challenge. However, it's working a lot better underneath here. We're getting some really nice stacked close-ups of the queens, but even the individual shots are looking exceptional. What I love so much about all of these pictures though is the background, and this is the bit that I always struggle on. I can't take the pictures anyway, but I definitely can't do that editing that makes these pictures pop. It's the colours in the background, it's the separation. I'm in love with these images. So I have had a fantastic day filming here with Stuart, and I can't quite get over the quality of these images. When he said he was coming to do macro photography, I thought, yeah, well, let's get close in, take some good macro photos of the bees. I was not prepared for the intensity and the magnification of these images. Absolutely insane. So my favourite part of today was coming back in, driving, and seeing Stuart Very focused on something on his hand like this. And I thought, what's he doing? Why is he so focused on his hand? And what it was is that he was letting a horsefly bite him so he could get a really nice close-up. And look at this close-up here, it is incredible. The detail, the size of the eyes. Did you even know that horseflies were that color? I certainly didn't. Stuart's specialty is macro photography, overlaying those different presets and coming up with images like this and this. And this— and to say that he overdelivered really is an understatement. He sent me hundreds of these images showing eggs, larvae, queen bees, pollen, everything in super close-up incredible detail. I know this will not be the last video with Stuart. I know he'll be back here again. I think he enjoyed it as much as I did. This is a wonderful place to capture macro photography, and I'm so glad that I got the very best macro man on the job. Thank you.
