Lice milking instead of weather lighting
01/13/2026In the competition for the best press photo in Lower Franconia, the university has once again sponsored the prize in the "Science" category. It went to photographer Pia Bayer for a photo of ants in her home garden.
"Severely ill ants sound the alarm and are killed" - "Horse ants amputate injured legs immediately" - "African ants nurse their injured conspecifics back to health": Anyone who reads the University of Würzburg's press releases knows that ants are a research focus at the Biocentre.
It is therefore fitting that the best press photo in Lower Franconia 2025 in the "Science" category also shows ants. The photo by photographer Pia Bayer shows several specimens crawling over the stem of a plant and milking aphids while the sun rises behind them.
Meticulous preparation without success
"I had actually planned something completely different that day," recalls Pia Bayer. She was sent out on 26 June 2025 with the task of delivering weather photos on the subject of "heat and thunderstorms" by 7 a.m. at the latest. "The day before, I clicked through several weather apps and satellite data to see where in my region a thunderstorm could pass through at the start of the day and where I could capture both the storm clouds and a bit of dawn from a high point," she says, describing her meticulous preparation.
Her choice fell on the Staffelberg in the district of Lichtenfels, with a view over the so-called Gottesgarten. A thunderstorm had been forecast for around 7am. Unfortunately for the photographer, it didn't materialise. Standing on the mountain, she therefore had to come up with a new picture idea without further ado. "A few days earlier, I had been fascinated by some ants milking lice in our own garden, so I went in search of some insects in the light of the rising sun and found my somewhat different weather motif."
About the person
Pia Bayer lives in the municipality of Untermerzbach, where she also grew up, and works primarily for the regional media in the northern Bavaria/southern Thuringia region, i.e. Neue Presse Coburg, Freies Wort Suhl, Fränkischer Tag and Mainpost. "I actually come from the text sector. As a pure photojournalist, I've only ever worked for the German Press Agency dpa," she says.
The contact with dpa also came about through an award: "After I won the Press Photo Bavaria 2022 competition with a photo in the 'Environment & Energy' category, the dpa regional office manager from Munich approached me after the award ceremony and asked if I would like to try my hand as a photographer for dpa," says Bayer. She has therefore also been working for the German Press Agency since 2023.
The competition
Photographers from all over Lower Franconia entered around one hundred and fifty pictures in the competition organised by the Bavarian Journalists' Association of Main Franconia and the district of Lower Franconia. The photo exhibition was supported by Bayernwerk, the savings banks Mainfranken (Würzburg), Schweinfurt and Aschaffenburg-Alzenau, the University of Würzburg and the City of Würzburg.
