This article was taken from the December 2014 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.

This image of a honeybee's eye is taken from a stop-motion animation made using a scanning-electron microscope. "I'm a photographer by profession, but have been fascinated by microscopy for 30 years," says Würzberg-based scientific photographer Stefan Diller. "I thought it would be fascinating to make movies by stringing together images scanned by a microscope." So he invented

nanoflight, a technique whereby a moving subject is scanned from the same angle to give viewers the illusion of flying around it in 3D space. "You get a deeper look into how the tiny parts on the specimen join together," says Diller. "It's like flying in a small helicopter over a microscopic surface, and looking down."

Each second of HD video generated requires up to an hour of scanning with the microscope. For this series, Diller set up 30 "waypoints", or spots where the honeybee's eye would move. "About 30 seconds of video took me 18 hours to record," he says. Once all the waypoints are mapped, the object is moved from point to point, and scanned by the microscope. Eight electron detectors are set up around the specimen to catch reflected electrons. "I then colour them artificially," says Diller. Coming soon: "My next step is to go fully 3D."

This article was originally published by WIRED UK