A Beekeeper’s Blindspot: Discovering Wing Wear Through Macrophotography
Patrick D. Krantz
One Summer morning, walking into my apiary as I often do, I stumbled upon photographer Zach Allerton crouched near the hives, his lens trained on a worker bee. He was using macrophotography to capture the fine details of her wings. He shared several images with me and for the first time, I noticed the ragged edges. I had not previously given much thought to it. Seeing his images was eye-opening — it inspired me to include a macrophotography assignment in my college environmental science class, so students too could discover these hidden details.
The following images are some of the results. They were all taken using macrophotography, which allows us to magnify tiny features like the serrations of a bee’s wing. Basic tips include stabilizing the camera, using natural light or a fill light to reduce shadows, and maintaining a steady distance from the subject. It will most likely require shooting a lot of images before capturing the right perspective, in focus. In class, I required only an inexpensive $40 macro lens that clipped onto my student’s cell phones. This affordable option still produced striking results.
Pic #1
Honey bees are born with wings that appear delicate, translucent, and nearly flawless. These wings are their lifeline to the world outside the hive, carrying them on thousands of journeys in search of nectar, pollen, and water. But unlike muscles or internal tissues, wings cannot repair themselves. Every trip into the field marks the beginning of a slow, irreversible decline in wing condition.
Pic #2
This decline is known as wing wear, a process in which the edges of the wings become frayed, nicked, and torn with time. Wear accumulates through repeated contact with vegetation, the mechanical strain of flight, and simple aging. It is not a disease, nor is it caused by parasites — it is the inevitable cost of being a forager.
Pic #3
Scientists have shown that wing wear is closely linked to a bee’s foraging history. While beekeepers often measure a bee’s age in days, wing wear better reflects the number of hours spent flying. Younger bees can be pushed into foraging early, and older bees may continue to work longer than expected. For this reason, wing wear is a more reliable measure of experience than chronological age (Mueller & Wolf-Mueller, 1993; Higginson & Barnard, 2004).
Pic #4
The scale of that effort is staggering. To produce just one pound of honey, honey bees collectively must visit an estimated two million flowers and fly more than 50,000 miles. Over the course of her brief life, a single worker bee may log more than 300 miles of flight, all on wings no larger than a fingernail. Each mile flown carries a cost, etched into the margins of her wings.
Pic #5
The effects of wear go far beyond appearance. Bees with worn wings must work harder in flight, beating their wings faster to generate the same lift as younger bees. As damage accumulates, their hovering ability, maneuverability, and carrying capacity are all reduced. Symmetric wear is difficult enough, but asymmetry — when one wing is more damaged than the other — exacts a particularly heavy toll (Vance & Roberts, 2014).
Pic #6
Experimental work has confirmed these costs. Dukas and Dukas (2011) found that clipping about 20% of a bee’s forewing reduced the total amount of food delivered to the colony by roughly the same proportion. The bees kept flying, but they carried less per trip and lived shorter lives. This shows the determination of the honey bee: even when damaged, she does not rest, but instead works herself more quickly toward death.
Pic #7
In observation hives, researchers noticed that bees with significant wear often shortened their trips, stayed closer to the hive, and recruited fewer nestmates to distant flowers. Their waggle dances reported food sources of lower profitability, subtly shifting the colony’s foraging strategy (Higginson, Barnard, & Tofilski, 2011). These findings reveal how the damage of one individual ripples outward into the collective behavior of thousands.
Pic #8
For most beekeepers, wing wear is almost invisible. Foragers rarely linger inside the hive. They arrive loaded with nectar or pollen, quickly transfer their burden to younger bees inside, and depart again. By the time their wings are tattered, they are seen only briefly at the entrance. Their end comes quietly, often far from the hive, when they no longer have the strength to return.
Pic #9
The honey bee’s life is already brief, measured in weeks rather than months. In the height of Summer, a worker may live just six weeks, most of it spent flying. During that time, she may visit 5,000 flowers in a single day if resources are abundant. Wing wear is thus not an abstract scientific curiosity — it is the physical evidence of a body pushed to its limits. Bees literally work until their wings fail.
Pic #10
This deterioration is part of a larger pattern of senescence in honey bees. Just as flight muscles accumulate oxidative damage (Seehuus et al., 2006), wings record the visible toll of labor. Together, these processes underscore a central truth: the honey bee worker is designed not for longevity, but for service. Her life is short, but every moment is spent for the colony.
Pic #11
While wing wear can be scored by scientists using standardized methods, from ordinal scales (Mueller & Wolf-Mueller, 1993) to experimental clipping (Vance & Roberts, 2014), its real significance is philosophical as much as biological. Wing wear tells a story about sacrifice, resilience, and the limits of living systems under constant strain.
Pic #12
From an ecological perspective, wing wear has practical applications. Researchers can use it as a low-cost proxy for foraging intensity, helping to compare colonies across seasons or landscapes. Heavier wear often appears later in nectar flows or in habitats with dense vegetation, where wings fray more quickly. For beekeepers, it offers a window — if they look closely — into the hidden lives of their foragers.
Pic #13
But for the bees themselves, wing wear is not a metric, it is their fate. Each forager that lifts off into the field does so knowing, in a biological sense, that her wings will never return unchanged. Each fray is the mark of a trip made, a flower visited, a load carried home.
Pic #14
In this way, the story of wing wear becomes the story of the honey bee itself: a narrative of bodies consumed by labor, of strength transformed into collective wealth, and of lives measured not by duration, but by contribution.
Pic #15
And so, when a bee’s wings are finally shredded and she fails to return, her absence is barely noticed by the colony she served. Yet in her wings remains the trace of her devotion—a life spent in flight until the very end.
Pic #16
Not a bee!
About Macrophotography
Lens kits vary greatly, from professional glass to simple cell phone
attachments. One cell phone option includes the Xenvo Pro Lens Kit for iPhone and Android. With even a basic clip-on lens, you can marvel at details normally unseen: the tattered edge of a wing, the pollen grains clinging to a leg, the reflection in a bee’s compound eye.
Photo contributors:
Zack Allerton shoots with an Olympus EM-1 Mark II camera body, Olympus M. Zuiko 60 mm f/2.8 macro lens, Olympus FL-600R flash unit, and an AK Macro Flash Diffuser.
Glenn Thompson shoots with a Canon R6 camera body, RF 100-500mm lens @ 428mm (1/1600”, f/6.3, ISO 2000)
Faith Giannamore uses her iPhone 15 camera with a 0.06x wide macro lens.
Valan Henry uses their Android 15 50MP OIS camera.
About the author:
Patrick D. Krantz is a faculty member at Westminster College, New Wilmington, PA, in the Harms Center for the Environment. Along with his students, he maintains a very active bee yard, which provides opportunities for teaching, research, and community engagement.
References
Dukas, R., & Dukas, L. (2011). Coping with nonrepairable body damage: Effects of wing wear on foraging performance in bees. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, 65(6), 1177–1183. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-010-1137-7
Higginson, A. D., & Barnard, C. J. (2004). Accumulating wing damage affects foraging decisions in honeybees (Apis mellifera L.). Ecological Entomology, 29(1), 52–59. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2311.2004.00571.x
Higginson, A. D., Barnard, C. J., & Tofilski, A. (2011). Worker–worker interactions and the effects of foraging experience on foraging performance in honey bees. Animal Behaviour, 81(3), 631–638. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2010.12.006
Mueller, U. G., & Wolf-Mueller, B. (1993). A method for estimating the age of bees: Age-dependent wing wear and the number of foraging trips. Journal of Insect Behavior, 6(4), 529–537. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01049526
Seehuus, S. C., Norberg, K., Gimsa, U., Krekling, T., & Amdam, G. V. (2006). Reproductive protein protects functionally sterile honey bee workers from oxidative stress. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 103(4), 962–967. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0502681103
Vance, J. T., & Roberts, S. P. (2014). The effects of artificial wing wear on flight behavior and performance in the honey bee (Apis mellifera). Journal of Experimental Biology, 217(16), 2787–2794. https://doi.org/10.1242/jeb.101352
