Original subtitles

(siren blares)

(traffic noise)

- [Narrator] This small garden in the heart

of a British city is home to naturalist

and wildlife filmmaker Martin Dohrn.

Martin's inventions have transformed the way

we can see the world, especially the world

of small creatures.

- It feels as if I've been a wildlife filmmaker

for centuries, but actually I think

it's only a couple of decades.

I've been lucky enough to film pretty much every kind

of animal: lions, monkeys, eagles, butterflies,

and quite a lot of insects, a lot of ants.

Over the years, I've invented, designed, hastily constructed

many different devices for filming insects

and small creatures, and they all rely on very tiny lenses

on a camera with a very small chip size.

What that gives us is a perspective

that is utterly different from the

world in which we normally live.

I mean, it kind of makes the world sort of 50 times

the size that we perceive it to be,

which means that this garden here is more like

a kind of 10 square kilometers of unexplored nature reserve,

with unknown creatures and drama and action,

every bit as exciting as anything that you could see

on the plains of Africa.

(wings fluttering)

In order to discover something, you see something,

you film something.

I didn't have to go all the way to Kilimanjaro

or the forests of Sumatra.

I can actually just come right here in my backyard

and see things no one has ever seen before,

and film species that while they are known to science,

their behavior is often undescribed.

For me, this is half the fun.

Just trying to make sense of it all.

(electronic music)

If you reduce your field of view to the very small,

even a city garden like this is brimming

with an astounding diversity of life.

The thing that amazed me most when I started to look

closely at this garden is that, besides the honey bee,

I've seen over 50 other species of bee.

(bee buzzes)

They come in almost every imaginable color.

Some of them even look like wasps.

Unlike the honey bee, most of the garden bees

live solitary lives.

(buzzing)

Wood holes in the fence are perfect for the tiniest.

But probably half of the bees here nest in the soil.

The mining bees have a constant battle

with nest thieves of all kinds.

But the owners usually win, because in nature too,

possession is 9/10ths of the law.

The wasp-like cuckoo bees are a more serious threat

where they spend their days searching for burrows

of the mining bees in which to lay their own eggs.

She can only find the rough location of the nest by scent.

By wafting air over her antennae.

To get the exact position, the cuckoo bee has to wait

for a mining bee to reveal herself as she leaves

to gather pollen, and follow her.

(bees buzzing)

At first, the mining bee acts confused,

as if she knows she's being tailed.

But then, quite often, the cuckoo bee will land

as if she's pretending to be a leaf.

Perhaps so as not to draw attention to herself.

When the mining bee thinks the coast is clear,

she goes to her burrow, closely watched by the cuckoo bee.

Now all the cuckoo bee has to do is

wait for the mining bee to leave again

before she can lay her own egg in the burrow unchallenged.

The problem with insects or any small creature

isn't just one of physical scale, it's one of time scale.

Some insects have been shown to perceive events

10 times as fast as we do, and so when something happens

in the insect world, it's just a blink of an eye

to human senses.

The only way for us to actually reveal

what's actually going on is to use slow motion photography.

(whimsical music)

Slow motion brings out the comedy of male bees

as they desperately search for mates.

Just trying to focus on a bee dancing around,

especially a male that's rampantly trying to

locate the female of his choice,

it's almost impossible.

Here I'm filming at 250 frames a second,

which is slowing life down 10 times.

I have a chance, but still my difficulty is

having the bee in the frame.

To help with this, we've built this thing called

a megascope, which has a wide angle lens on the end of it,

but away from the camera so the whole thing doesn't

threaten the bee.

Can focus very quickly and it's much easier

to have it pointing in the right dtion.

The female, she uses this patch of flowers

for nectar, mostly.

And that's where the male is waiting for her.

He patrols up and down here and he attacks anything

that vaguely resembles the female.

He's easy to distinguish because he looks more bee-like.

He's kinda brown.

And the female is actually beautiful velvet black.

When he sees the female, his first task is to hover

in front of her, and it's almost as if he's

displaying to her to say, "Hello, look, I'm this cool.

"I can hover.

"Look at the way I can hover."

And she is, as far as I can tell,

invariably just ignores him.

(whimsical orchestra music)

Eventually, he jumps on her.

And I've never actually seen the male

court a female successfully.

I've only ever seen his efforts rebuffed.

And the female flying away as quickly as she can.

People say the most important thing about photography

is to be in the right place at the right time.

But for small creatures, that's extremely difficult.

That's why we built frankencam.

We called it frankencam cuz it's an unholy alliance

of bits of other machines all tied together,

and a few specially designed circuit boards.

To make the images, we borrowed a camera from a microscope,

we got some optics from the 70s and coupled them

with a lens from a web cam.

Well the re is that frankencam can glide into position

without frightening anything and can wait

as long as it takes.

Or until it rains.

As an example of the kind of drama we can find

just by flying in between the leaves a bit.

Today, I saw a wolf spider carrying its babies on its back.

We have hundreds of wolf spiders here,

but I've never actually been able to see it in close up.

Today, quite a few females allow us to get

very close with the lens, but they also just allowed us

to kind of float among them and watch what they were doing.

Which is mostly just basking to get the babies some warmth.

Scorpions do exactly the same thing,

but we don't have scorpions,

so it's fantastic to be able to find creatures,

even though they're really tiny.

They're only three or four millimeters long, these spiders.

But it's wonderful to see such complex behavior

in such allegedly simple animal.

Frankencam also gives us the means to go deep

into the undergrowth and there we can find

another range of animals.

In close up, from the side, wood lice look utterly different

from how we normally see them from above.

We managed to get a special medical endoscope

on frankencam and we've been able to actually

drive it under a flower pot to see what they do.

Most of the time, wood lice eat rotting leaves,

but sometimes they'll feed on the old dead animal,

even if it's their own kind.

They seem to use their front legs in a way

that's more rodent-like than primitive crustacean-like.

It could be that we've underestimated wood lice,

we've just ignored them for so long.

But for me, they are truly the stars of the dark,

damp corners of the garden.

A garden like this at just 10 by 30 meters can be,

if you look closely, if you look in amongst the plants,

can become a really quite large nature reserve

with all kinds of incredible behaviors

and rare events happening every day.

Just waiting for someone to have a look.

(buzzes)

(bangs against lens)

(soft music)