A dynamic photo of a bee mating ball.

There's a female driven narrative with these bees. The bee ball shot are males trying to mate with a single female. Female bees dig their own nests, provide pollen and nectar for each burrow of many they dig, and tend to individually. These bees are solitary bees and the females nest in aggregations, but each female is in control of her own destiny. When they finish their nests, they actually close them up to protect them, and walk away to die.

Karine Aigner's life reads like a set of novellas. Raised in Saudi Arabia, Karine motorcycled through Vietnam, circumnavigated the globe by ship, taught English in Taiwan, and then there was the time the hyena pups chewed her shoes (while on her feet). On her first trip to Africa, she fell in love with a continent. From one chapter to the next, her adventures uncover her fervor to tell the stories of life through the lens of a camera; her passion became stories of animals: their relationships to humans, their relationships to their own world, and their existence in the space between the two.

Follow Karine on Instagram @kaigner.