The team of Nina Fatouros, Tibor Bukovinszky and Hans Smid whose site is an unbelievably detailed study of bugs and their minute beauty, have made film at speeds of 22,000 frames per second of tiny parasitic flying insects almost 900 times faster than a TV-screen can show.

This is the first time the flight behaviour of the parasitic wasp which is used as biological crop protector to kill the eggs from which harmful caterpillars grow, has been observed. It was known that parasitic wasps hitchhike on to larger insects, such as butterflies, but until now nobody had seen how the wasps were actually able to fly to the butterflies and their eggs.

The high speed film shows the parasitic wasp jumping  into the air, flaps around, and then somehow landing, sometimes even face-first. Nevertheless, wasps are able to fly over some distance, wings beating at 350/strokes per second.

The insect are estimated to weigh about 1/40,000th of a gram, but it is not the smallest known insect; the Tanzanian parasitic wasp spans less than 0.3 mm, which is about 3 times smaller. This extremely small insect cannot be bred so far, therefore it can only be found and filmed in the wild.

The movies are made by researchers at Wageningen University, part of Wageningen UR, using a Phantom high-speed camera, made available to the nature amateurs, artists, and hobby photographers that applied to participate in the Flight Artists project.

The project aims to involve the public in research into the way in which birds, bats, insects, and even seeds fly, using the newest high-speed video techniques to shoot images of fliers in Nature that fascinate them.

A range of special lenses, lamps and field facilities is available to record details that are invisible to the naked eye; invisible, either because they are too small or, more likely, because they are too rapid for the observer. So far, 54 participants have  trained to take this extraordinary camera into the field.

The Flight Artist team is the 2010 winner of the national Netherlands contest for academic research groups to stimulate science understanding and participation for the layman. Movies are available online at  and on YouTube.