For filmmakers Mark Deebles and Victoria Stone, no project is too challenging — or too high. To shoot “The Queen of Trees,” an episode for the PBS series Nature, Deebles and Stone climbed 40ft. up a tree to capture in HD the delicate symbiotic relationship of a massive sycomore fig tree and the fig wasp — an insect so tiny it can fly through the eye of a needle.

Deebles on shooting “The Queen of Trees”:

VS: What were the obstacles you encountered while shooting “The Queen of Trees”?

MD: Many! I had no knowledge of macro [photography] before we started, but the biggest problem was trying to get natural behavior from .04in.-long insects with very specialized behaviors. Some of which only lasted five to 10 seconds, happened only once in the course of the insects' eight-week life cycle, and took place in the dark in the confines of a grape-sized fig, 40ft. up in a tree above a croc-filled river in Africa.

Nobody could tell us when all the various behaviors happened, so we had to spend two years working it out for ourselves — learning the timings and how it related to fig development. Everything was filmed onsite, so we had to set up a portable macro studio close to the tree in a tent in the middle of the bush — everything was powered by small petrol generators. Almost every time we had to shoot a fig, it involved tower building or rope work for canopy access. At the same time as trying to crack the fig-wasp story, we had to hop into our plane to try to film aerials whenever the weather looked spectacular, as well as shoot underwater, canopy, long lens, and hide work, but it all helped tell the story and was worth it in the end.

VS: How long did it take to shoot the material?

MD: It took two years of shooting and six months of editing 100 hours of material.

VS: What camera and editing equipment were used to shoot in HD?

MD: We used two Sony 700A HDCAMs, then downconverted the HD tapes to DVCAM. We edited the material with two Avid systems running on a Mac G4 laptop in the field and a G5 at the base with 2.5TB storage.