James Cameron explains why he is so enchanted by bees

By Emma Gometz edited by Claire Cameron

James Cameron is a household name: the director of Titanic and the Avatar movies, he is one of the most celebrated film makers of all time. What most people might not know about Cameron, however, is that he is also something of a beekeeper.

Cameron runs an organic vegetable farm that includes 300 beehives. Yet even for Cameron, his latest documentary project, the Secrets of the Bees, was “revelatory,” he says.

“There’s so much that I didn’t know about bee society.”

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The documentary series, which premieres on National Geographic tomorrow and will be available to stream on Disney+ and Hulu on April 1, offers an intimate perspective on a hive of honeybees preparing to survive the winter. The inner workings of the hive, usually invisible, are revealed: viewers are exposed to tender and curious moments, such as a close-up timelapse of a tiny bee larva metamorphosing into an adult bee, and what feels like the apian version of a Viking funeral—when the bees hurl their dead over the edge of the hive to the ground.

“I certainly was of the belief that bees were basically little Roombas that were hardwired with relatively basic programming,” Cameron, who executive produced the new series, says. “But it turns out that while they have that, they’re also capable of learning and being able to learn specific tasks.”

Scientists, farmers, and other bee experts help guide the viewer through the behaviors of bees. One scene shows a research project where scientists observe bees landing on colorful wooden balls and rolling them around without any incentive to do so—as if they were toys.

“These organisms are a lot like us,” said Sammy Ramsey, an entomologist who was a science consultant on the series, at a press event. “They need the same things that we need, even right down to play.”

Bees are also highly cooperative, working together to solve a puzzle in one experiment and performing intimidating hive-wide displays to ward off predators in the wild.

One of the series’ cinematographers, John Brown, captured the behavior of Japanese honeybees working to keep Asian giant hornets from reaching their larvae. The entire performance involved doing the “bee equivalent of a stadium wave” and using leaf cuttings to “clean” away hornet scent markings on the beehive so that the predatory bugs were less likely to return.

Allowing these behaviors to play out while filming was a challenge, he says, and required designing camera rigs to pick up the behaviors clearly.

Figuring out how to shoot these sequences showed Brown how each bee colony, and even individual bees, behaved in distinct ways. “It’s kind of confirmed my sense that that these animals, even in within the same species, can have a lot of different personality types,” he says.

The cinematographers also had to innovate around the limitations of camera technology to achieve this. Because of the bees’ tiny size, the depth of field the zoomed-in cameras could capture was much smaller than your average photo. It meant the team rode a fine line of capturing the amount of detail they wanted to from the creatures, while also trying to keep other aspects of frame in focus and not disturbing them.

“We have some specialist lenses that allow us to get very high magnification and keep as much depth of field as we can,” Brown says. But “even though our camera technology has evolved hugely over the last sort of decade, physics hasn’t changed.”

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