♪♪♪
Dohrn: This is Bristol, England...
and this is my garden.
It's not really that special.
We've just let some of the wild back in.
But as a wildlife filmmaker, I knew there were revelations here
that could be just as amazing
as anything I'd ever filmed across the globe.
In the spring of 2020,
as the country goes into lockdown,
outside, the garden is coming alive.
Suddenly, there are bees emerging all over.
These bees, they just go zoom, you know, zoom.
♪♪♪
But if they're nesting, I can't get near them.
I can see these little antennae come up,
but they look over, and I'm absolutely still,
but now I have to go to the focus
and as soon as I do that, they go down again.
Discovering the secret life of bees took me
on a journey I was not expecting.
♪♪♪
[ Sirens wailing ]
Dohrn: Let's have a look.
Cripes.
Oh, dear.
Man: [ Laughs ]
Dohrn: For over 30 years, I've been filming wild animals
all over the world,
and all of a sudden, I'm locked down at home.
My only escape now from the pandemic
is in my city garden
and my fascination with the wild bees that live here.
♪♪♪
Turning my cameras onto my own backyard
is revealing things as spectacular
as anything I have ever seen before.
Transporting me to another universe.
Another dimension of existence.
Have I just got pandemic fever
or is it just another midlife crisis?
Nah. I'm too old for a midlife crisis,
it's more of a late-life revelation.
♪♪♪
Bees are fast. You can't film them with ordinary cameras
and ordinary lenses.
If you've got something just going like this,
well, you know,
you don't know what the hell it's doing.
You really need fast reflexes,
you need equipment that's barely been developed,
you have to film everything in slow motion,
and you have to have the reactions of a hawk.
I've probably got reactions as good as a rabbit.
Probably not even that good.
[ Laughs ]
♪♪♪
I'm traveling into a hidden world
but one that exists around us all.
Even in a garden like this in the middle of the city,
there is an astonishing diversity of bees.
If I told people, "Oh, yeah, there's 60 species of bee
in my garden, " they go, " Really?
Are you sure?"
I go, "Yeah, well more than 60."
♪♪♪
One of the very first bees out
is the hairy-footed flower bee.
Check out his hairy legs.
I can get close to film these bees
because they fly between the same patches of flowers,
scent-marking their routes as they go.
They're like perfumed bee highways.
These bees just go zoom, you know, zoom.
These, of all the bees, are the most fun to watch
because of their sheer precision flying.
They can literally turn
on a sixpence in a fraction of a second.
They got these funny little beady eyes
and they this really kind of keen hovering,
and when the female moves, they follow her round
and they... And I just love that.
In those early weeks, most of the other bees
were not even out yet.
[ Beeping ]
Man: Today the prime minister has announced
that to save lives
and to stop the spread of the virus, we must stay at home.
Dohrn: As everyone in the country retreats indoors,
underground, the garden is coming alive.
♪♪♪
What most people don't realize is actually bees
spend much of their lives
not as a lovely bee flying around in the sun
but in the dark as an egg,
or a sort of maggoty thing in a nest somewhere.
♪♪♪
Then there's the transformation,
from a larvae...
into a flying wonder of nature.
♪♪♪
Metamorphosis...
It really is an extraordinary process.
It takes 21 days
for these domesticated honey bees to make the leap.
There are 270 other species of bee in this country.
They are the wild bees.
Very different to the social honey bee
that we're all so used to.
♪♪♪
They mostly live solitary lives,
and many will have been waiting fully formed
throughout the winter.
Each species with its own particular time to emerge,
coinciding with the flowers it likes the best.
♪♪♪
In complete darkness,
somehow each bee knows which way to head
on its journey to reach the light.
♪♪♪
This is the first time they've seen the world.
♪♪♪
When the bee comes out of its hole, they sit there
and they look out and they do this with their head.
They're doing, like, a kind of pixel shift thing.
I think what they're trying to do
is make a very high-resolution image
that they will need to remember to return to.
Suddenly, there are bees emerging all over the garden.
It's kicking off all over the place.
But this is the challenge...
if I want to know more about their lives,
somehow, I've got to follow them.
[ Women vocalizing ]
♪♪♪
This garden in spring is utterly beautiful.
♪♪♪
I'm amazed that so much diversity can exist
in such a small place.
[ Women vocalizing ]
♪♪♪
Woman: ♪ Open your eyes ♪
♪ Look around you ♪
♪ Feel the breeze ♪
♪ On your face ♪
♪ And breathe in ♪
Dohrn: It's not really special,
we've just let some of the wild back in.
We didn't really try very hard to kind of manicure it.
We just... A lot of things we just relaxed about.
Man: It's full of weeds basically is what you're saying?
Dohrn: There's no such thing as a weed,
there's only plants that people don't understand.
They're all as beautiful as any kind of fancy tulips
or chrysanthemums.
Indeed for me, they're more beautiful
because they've been created entirely
by the forces of evolution.
That is nature.
[ Slow-motion buzzing ]
For me, a flower is more beautiful
if you can see the bee it was built for actually using it.
The flower bees have evolved
alongside tubular flowers like these.
It's not until you have the luxury of having
the pictures in slow motion,
in focus, in a way that you can go,
"Oh, I see, that's what it's doing."
I had no idea they had such huge tongues,
it really is longer than its body.
As she drinks, she buzzes her wing muscles,
dislodging pollen onto her body...
...which she takes to the next flower.
Bees are at the center of the world's pollination services.
They are pollinating the fabric of life.
Yet, all over the world, bees are declining.
We really do need to start taking more notice of them.
♪♪♪
But opening up the secret life of the bees is not as easy
as I was expecting.
♪♪♪
I soon found out that many of the bees
really didn't want to be filmed at all.
The first month was incredibly frustrating
because I had all this extraordinary behavior
just going on in front of me
that I could see from 10 feet away,
but as soon as I tried to zoom in on it with the camera,
it either stopped or, you know, they flew away.
The flower bees kind of accepted me.
I mean, it was easy to frighten them off...
...but some of the other bees I simply couldn't get near.
The furrow bees, you know, if they're nesting,
I can't get near them
and it is hilarious to watch them.
I can see these little antennae come up
and then I can see these little eyes come up,
and they look over and I'm absolutely still,
but now I have to go to the focus,
and as soon as I do that, they go down again.
It can take half a day to get through that process
where the bee's going, "Okay, it's not going away,
I'm hungry, I've got to go and do something."
I've had plenty of experience
filming small animals of all kinds.
My last film was about ants with David Attenborough.
But wild bees are very different.
They're so alert, to get close,
I have to invent all kinds of gadgets.
There we go.
This is a lens. It's a super-tiny,
super-wide-angle lens,
super-high quality.
That is the purpose of all of this stuff.
♪♪♪
In order to get anywhere near the bees,
I have to kind of shrink myself down to their size,
but I also have to stretch time.
Bees live in a completely different dimension.
At this scale, we get a fresh view
on the physics of bee existence.
And what it's like to be a creature
that weighs a fraction of an ounce
but that can gather over 100 times its body weight
in pollen in just a matter of weeks.
This is the bee that everyone said couldn't possibly fly,
but of course she can fly extremely well.
You see those wing beats? Above them are mini tornados
which actually suck her into the air.
♪♪♪
In this dimension, the sound shifts as well.
[ Buzzing, fluttering ]
[ Slow-motion chirping, buzzing ]
Listening to bird calls filmed at this speed
evokes their dinosaur origins.
[ Distorted chirping ]
Well, for me anyway.
♪♪♪
It is incredible to see how they develop
an understanding of their surroundings
and how their experience grows.
When any of the bees come out, most of them have never
even seen a flower before. They don't know what it is.
When they discover something like a dandelion,
they get plastered in pollen.
You only see that on the first days in spring.
Shortly after, they know
that they don't want to get covered in pollen.
They either collect it or leave it alone.
It seems to me they are learning.
But actually, for me, the most interesting bit is the males
when they emerge, not only have they not seen flowers,
they've never seen a female either.
They must have some kind of instinctive urge to look
for something that resembles a female.
But they are not very good at it yet.
They're jumping on flies, they're jumping on leaves,
they're jumping on completely different species of bee.
This only happens in the early part of their lives.
They learn quickly from their mistakes.
They only live a week or so,
and the race is on to find a mate.
I'm not sure I could say that insects were in love,
but certainly male bees are in lust.
The flower bee males are actually quite good
at identifying their females.
Even so, he's still not having much luck.
I think what his aim is
he wants to jump on her back
and enclose her wings so that she can't fly away.
Time after time, he fails miserably.
She was just foraging quietly on her own.
Next thing she knows, she's being slammed
from the side by an amorous male
and now they're tumbling through the undergrowth.
A look of shock, anger, horror, you know,
even in a bee with no facial expressions
tells me that this isn't good.
Now he's just looking at her "Oh, I love you, I do.
I love you."
He's going "Yeah, I love you, I do.
Oh, yeah."
♪♪♪
Hunting for females is tiring work.
This male is looking for a hole to rest in.
♪♪♪
But not all the holes are empty.
♪♪♪
For a few weeks in the year,
hungry green fang spiders feast on naive flower bee males,
helping to weed out the slow and dim-witted.
A bigger threat to most bees in my garden
comes not from spiders, but other bees.
Like the sinister-looking nomad bee...
...who is looking for the underground nest
of a mining bee
by following her.
When the mining bee turns, the nomad immediately
drops to the ground as if playing dead.
When the mining bee thinks the coast is clear,
she goes to her burrow.
The nomad is watching.
As the mining bee leaves, the nomad bee sneaks in
to lay her egg in the nest...
...where her larvae will eat the mining bee egg
and feast on her pollen store.
No wonder so many of these bees hate being watched.
♪♪♪
As spring draws to a close,
I've already counted over 30 species of bee in the garden.
And the variety is... Is actually quite mind-boggling.
From minute yellow-faced bees to gigantic bumblebees.
From shiny sweat bees
to hairy carder bees.
♪♪♪
From the good old honey bees...
to these scissor bees.
No bigger than a mosquito.
♪♪♪
Filming this scale of bee
makes a difficult task practically impossible.
They block their nests with the tiniest grains of sand.
I'm focused on an area
that's about that big, you know, if you can imagine.
Blinking would make the camera shake.
You know, sometimes you can see the heartbeat going like this
as I'm trying to film it.
Phew. It's a nightmare, mate.
There's a new bee out.
It's a wool carder bee.
The male is a monster
and you can see the female is half his size.
♪♪♪
This male owns all of these flowers.
♪♪♪
He'll chase anything that comes into this territory.
Bees like this bumblebee are in trouble
if one of these guys is around.
On his rear end, he's got some
really quite vicious-looking spikes
which can inflict serious damage to his enemies.
He's a bit like a lion in the sense
that he mates with the females whenever he can,
he attacks anything that moves in his territory,
and in particular, when he meets a male of his own species,
there is trouble.
He meets the other male and the two of them size
each other up.
He tries to stab him with his spikes.
The interloper is driven off.
The only welcome bee in this territory is a female.
The male mates with the same female
three or four times in a row...
...before they seem to get a sense
that they've both done this
and they don't need to do it anymore.
It does appear as if the male can actually recognize
which females he's mated with.
He just kind of flies up, has a look, and then flies off.
So this is the garden where it all takes place.
And this... this bit here is particularly good
'cause it's a really hot corner,
and this fence post here is where the scissor bees live.
That's a particularly good place to see them.
Well, the Waitrose house... I bought that in Waitrose...
the male leaf cutters and the male mason bees
love it for roosting at night,
so sometimes you can see them all looking out,
like they're all tucked up in bed
and they're just watching, waiting for the weather
to pick up.
So this is the flower bee highway right through here,
and this is where the males will search for females
and the females might be here, feeding on the nectar here.
If a male comes along and he's, like, slams on the brakes...
[imitates brakes squealing]...
then he will hover and stare at her
in a really appreciative way.
I've never, ever seen successful mating in this situation.
But I have seen them mate on the ground.
On his route, he also has little sunlit patches of leaves
which the female likes to sit on.
The female... there he is... The female, she might just be
cleaning pollen off herself or something like that
and then the male comes along, same process,
he sees her, he's transfixed, he's like, "Oh, my God."
It's like a little dance.
He has to kind of hover round her
and then get closer and closer.
He jumps on her and he puts his...
puts some legs around her,
and then basically... Then he gets up
and he has to... He gets his hairy legs out
and he starts waving them around,
but in real time, it's like about...
You know, it's much faster than that.
In slow motion, you can see the tufts on his hairy legs.
He is gently...
Three times he brushes them on the female's antenna,
then three times he brushes them on the female's antenna.
♪♪♪
It took me a month to discover what he actually does
with those hairy legs during sex.
All I knew at the start of that
was that the hairs are associated with scent.
That's about as much as anybody ever knew.
♪♪♪
By the start of summer, we seem to have survived
the first wave of the pandemic,
and us humans were finally being able to leave home
and re-enter the streets of our city.
♪♪♪
But I was in far too deep.
♪♪♪
There's a new wave of bees on its way.
Here, the streets of Bee City are starting to come alive.
Bee City is really just some bits of old wood
sort of just along the very back hedge,
just above the street.
I'd heard that if you drill some holes in it, you know,
bees like that.
And I noticed bees were using it.
There seems to be a kind of shortage of a culmination,
so I built some more.
I thought I'd make a more proper bee hotel.
♪♪♪
They're all interested in holes.
Holes are their thing.
They can't fly past
an interesting hole without having a look.
They just love it.
♪♪♪
It's all about the holes.
This is where bees create their homes.
That's what wild bees do.
They lay down a larder of pollen and nectar
on which to lay their egg.
They make an internal wall, seal off the cell,
then repeat until this tunnel is full.
♪♪♪
Yellow-faced bees are also moving into Bee City.
They're tiny little things about 5 millimeters long.
They're so small they're pretty much invisible.
Most people just don't even know they're there,
and they just look like tiny little black flies.
You wouldn't know what's going on.
These two have made their homes in a side chamber
of a bigger hole and they can join forces
to keep guard against their arch-nemesis...
...the wasp gasteruption.
♪♪♪
Gasteruption, well, gasteruption jaculator.
It's an incredible gangly, weird thing that hovers in such a way
so it just looks like an alien with a jetpack
just kind of hovering around,
sort of looking for the poor old
yellow-faced bee to zap with its ray gun.
♪♪♪
It has an incredibly long ovipositor
that it uses to lay its eggs
in the nests of yellow-faced bees.
Those antennae can detect the scent of the host.
♪♪♪
A yellow-face comes back, sees an intruder, and attacks.
♪♪♪
They've won this small battle,
but their problems are far from over.
A huge wood-carving leafcutter appeared in the old city.
It's one of the first of this species I've ever seen.
♪♪♪
She lands right in the yellow-faced bee's hole.
♪♪♪
The yellow-face rears up on its hind legs
to try and intimidate this giant.
♪♪♪
The way it was now well
and truly blocked to the yellow-face's nest.
It's tough on the smaller bees,
but shows just how ruthless these single mothers need to be.
The tunnel definitely now belonged to her.
♪♪♪
I didn't know at the time, but I would get to know
this bee better than any others in the garden.
♪♪♪
I called her Nicky because she had a nick in her wing.
But getting close didn't come easy.
I think it's really important to know
that the thing that you are filming
is the thing that the animal would normally be doing.
When the bee is relaxed, it's doing
what it wants to do as opposed
to what my presence might be forcing it to do.
I really wanted to film leafcutters
because of their amazing nest-building behavior.
But it is not as easy to film as I thought.
♪♪♪
I honestly sat by her first tunnel
for like, you know, two days.
I knew that Nicky didn't want anything to do with me
because she had absolutely avoided me
at all costs.
And I got really worried,
so I backed off to let her get on with her life.
♪♪♪
In Bee City, it was easy to get distracted
by all kinds of drama.
In the distance, I could see the fly.
The jumping spider comes down again and then he sneaks along,
and he comes up over again and he looks around
and when they do their little
looking at the fly, he just gets up there,
then a greenbottle lands over to the left
and he has a look at that, "No, that's not it."
Fly is doing the grooming, you know, because a lot of work,
all that grooming, you know, the back and the shoulders
and the... And doing the head and the eye.
And he gets to a point, when he's close enough,
I can see that he's put his legs down, ready to jump.
He jumps, and then it's like, "yes,"
and it all comes to a stop exactly where it left off,
exactly in focus
because the spider had laid a silk anchor right there.
He's got the fly.
It's a bad fly for bees.
It's one that lays eggs in bee holes,
and so in this case, the spider is a friend of the bees,
not an enemy.
While I was trying to persuade some furrow bees
to let me film them at their nest,
I noticed that Nicky had completed
that nest literally 3 meters from me [Chuckles]
without me noticing.
Where I'd been waiting for 2 days
was now a green completed cell
that would have been exactly the behavior
I was trying to film.
Now, suddenly, I had a new opportunity.
Nicky was moving to the new builds to make another nest.
That was probably a month after she first appeared.
After that, she'd pretty much accepted me.
There is a moment when she looks me directly in the eye
but not showing fear.
She just looks at the camera and then she comes out a bit,
she looks around, she looks at all the other things,
and she looks at the camera again
and goes, "Oh, yeah,
I think I'll be off foraging now. Bye."
And off she goes.
Finally, Nicky shows me her leaf-cutting skills.
The reason they cut leaves is to line the wooden tunnel,
making a bee-size cell
before smearing it with nectar and other stuff.
Then they go off to gather pollen to fill it.
Leafcutters use their furry belly to gather pollen,
but they are far from cuddly.
♪♪♪
Unlike honey bees,
most of the wild bees have a sting they can re-use.
And when hassled, they don't hesitate to use it.
♪♪♪
The feisty leafcutters also have an armor-like exoskeleton.
♪♪♪
If this crab spider is to have any chance of a kill,
it has to find the soft junction between the head
and the body to deliver its venom.
♪♪♪
A sting in the face does the trick.
♪♪♪
My relationship with Nicky really seems to be growing.
I mean, you know, most people would think that's stupid
that a bee and a man could have a relationship,
but there's no doubt that we were getting to know each other.
I can tell she's looking at me.
Does she know these are my eyes? I don't know, I have no idea,
but scientists have shown that honey bees can recognize
individual people, so why wouldn't she?
♪♪♪
This really is a city of bees, and with 10 species living here,
I suppose you'd say it was a very multicultural place.
♪♪♪
Spending this much time in the neighborhood means
I'm even on first-name terms with a few of the residents.
The naming just comes to you, so Nicky...
I call her Nicky 'cause she's got a nick in her wing.
There's another one who is missing
half of one of her antenna, she's called One-tenna.
And there are two others,
one of them is called The Neighbor
because she lives right next door to One-tenna,
and then there's another one called The Late Comer
because she was the last one to appear.
Alongside them, there are two mason bees
which are much smaller.
One of them lived right next to Nicky.
I called her Leia, derived from her Latin name,
osmia lignaria.
I could call her Princess Leia, but I just call her Leia.
If she's a princess, she has a very small kingdom,
which is basically 3 tunnels
full of babies that she's made this year.
♪♪♪
Throughout Bee City, everyone is hard at work
finishing their tunnels.
♪♪♪
The mason bees like Leia here also cut leaves for their nests,
but chew it in to pulp to seal the hole.
♪♪♪
These red mason bees use mud to seal up their nest.
♪♪♪
Leafcutters bring back perfect pieces of circular leaf,
cut to fit their tunnel exactly.
When closing a hole, Nicky will put literally 40 layers of leaf
in there all stacked up
to foil her archenemy, the sharp-tailed bee.
The sharp-tail is a cuckoo bee,
and it specializes in parasitizing leafcutter nests.
The sharp tails are a constant threat.
♪♪♪
I think in Nicky's mind, maybe 40 layers of protection
aren't even enough.
She starts going off and looking in other tunnels
or underneath the blocks.
I thought maybe she's looking for some little bits of rock
or something.
She comes back with a stick, it's like 2 inches long,
and she's flying through the air with this stick.
I mean, what is she doing with that?
How does the stick compute for her?
She's experimenting, thinking it through.
Clearly something's going on in her mind here.
Remember, this is a bee.
A moment like that reveals far more than preconceived ideas
about what a leafcutter does.
♪♪♪
But not as odd as I first thought.
This construction of grass stems
takes bee architecture to new heights.
♪♪♪
The red-tailed mason bee, nicknamed the tent-making bee,
has solved the problem of cuckoo bees
breaking into her nursery.
♪♪♪
After carefully picking a snail shell,
she fills it with both leaf pulp and mud.
♪♪♪
Like Nicky, every stage of the process involves decisions.
She spends a long time to position the shell
into just the right angle on the ground.
♪♪♪
Even digging it into the soil to hold that position.
♪♪♪
But that's just the beginning.
Next comes a huge undertaking.
♪♪♪
She gathers hundreds of bits
of carefully chosen sticks of grass.
♪♪♪
To drive the stems into the structure,
she vibrates her wing muscles,
which is why the whole thing hangs together.
♪♪♪
Over three hours, she assembles a huge structure
more than 20 times her height.
♪♪♪
Nothing can get into this fortress.
♪♪♪
Back at Bee City,
Nicky is getting to the end of her tenure.
She's looking a bit ragged now,
but she's still working hard on her tunnels.
Inside, I could see how neatly she's placed the pollen,
and this was white thistle pollen.
There were no thistles in my garden.
Where was this thistle pollen coming from?
I watched Nicky when she left, and I watched the direction
she went in.
She just kept going up in a north westerly direction.
So then I looked on a map, and I looked at the places
that, in that line, that could possibly have those thistles,
and I got to a place called Redling Green
where there were thistles there.
When I looked, there was a bee pretty much identical to Nicky,
I was absolutely sure that was Nicky.
[ Slow-motion buzzing ]
When she flies out of her hole,
she has a mental map of the city.
She goes to a place she has previsualized.
She is going to go to that destination
and do the thing that she has planned to do.
She has a complex world to deal with,
has to deal with mating courtship, finding a home,
she has to forage, go great distances.
She has to do this all on her own.
She can't just ask her mates, "Yeah,
yeah, seen any good flowers recently, mate?"
And that I find is the remarkable thing.
[ Birds chirping ]
[ Buzzing ]
The more I became absorbed in their lives,
the more I was seeing differences
in how individuals react to each other.
One-tenna is particularly aggressive to everyone.
She always seems to be arguing with her mason bee neighbor.
They seem to have a tit-for-tat fighting thing going on.
Nicky and her neighbor Leia just get along fine.
They never argue.
One-tenna... possibly because the antenna are linked to memory
through scent... came back,
but instead of going to her hole,
she went to the neighbor's hole.
She's got the neighbor's jaws in her jaws.
She's trying to pull the neighbor out of her hole.
This fight went on and on and on,
and I mean I was really worried.
I didn't know what to do.
I thought, "Well, should I break it up?"
You can't just interfere with things like that.
It's never that simple.
But I really did want it to stop.
These bees were clearly using huge amounts of energy.
That story tells me that these bees, they're not all identical.
[ Slow-motion buzzing ]
All of them behave differently.
They must have some serious brain power.
People would say, "Oh, yeah, it's just instinct."
Well, yeah, but how does the instinct work?
"Well, it's an algorithm, mate."
It's like, well, how is that different to what we do?
It's really hard to explain, but I really feel for them.
They're really... I could say they're my friends,
but I mean, they don't really give me much.
Every now and again, one bee
or other might actually land on the camera
and that, I do feel touched by that.
♪♪♪
I felt I knew Nicky pretty well by now,
but I wasn't ready for what she let me see next.
♪♪♪
She was well on the way to filling another tunnel
for the next generation.
She then does this extraordinary thing.
She turns round in the tunnel,
something I've never seen her do,
so she has to form a ball with her body.
Like a kind of gymnast doing some kind of strange move.
And then when I pull focus in to the hole, I could see an egg,
a great big egg.
It's huge. I mean, it's like three or four millimeters long.
♪♪♪
I honestly never expected to be able to see an egg
from the outside in that way.
What a privilege to be there at that moment.
[ Slow-motion buzzing ]
♪♪♪
I have been sitting here for a couple of months.
It feels like a lifetime,
but of course it's not for me, but it is for a bee.
Ridings: ♪ You left my love, you hit the target ♪
Dohrn: I've seen Nicky make three complete tunnels,
each with at least six cells inside.
And now she's on her fourth tunnel.
Ridings: ♪ I never noticed ♪
♪♪♪
Dohrn: But it wasn't just me taking
an interest in Nicky's new egg.
♪♪♪
Nicky was by this time very tired
and she was just sitting on a brick, just a foot away.
♪♪♪
Ridings: ♪ And I hate that you're gone ♪
♪ And I hate that I don't wanna let go ♪
Dohrn: As the sharp tail bee went in, I was willing her,
"Nicky, Nicky, come up, get in your hole."
But, um, she didn't.
You can tell if a sharp tail bee's been successful
'cause she'll come out with some pollen stuck to her tail.
[ Slow-motion buzzing ]
♪♪♪
Nicky went in.
It's possible she went in, saw that it had been parasitized,
and thought, "Ah, what the hell."
She'd had a very successful nest-building life,
so I didn't worry about her legacy.
She'd had a good legacy.
And that actually was pretty much the last time
I saw her.
Ridings: ♪ I'm gonna build castles ♪
♪ From the rubble of your love ♪
♪ I'm gonna be more than ♪
Dohrn: After she left,
I actually noticed that I missed her.
Ridings: ♪ Oh ♪
♪ Castles ♪
♪ From the rubble of your love ♪
Dohrn: I had no idea that I was going to get so involved,
if that's the word, with an individual insect.
Ridings: ♪ You ever thought I was ♪
Dohrn: It's changed my view of insects altogether.
Ridings: ♪ Castles ♪
Dohrn: It's changed my view of the world altogether.
Ridings: ♪ I'm gonna be stronger than you ever thought I was ♪
[ Birds chirping ]
♪♪♪
To learn more about what you've seen
on this "Nature" program,
visit pbs.org.
♪♪♪