GARGANTUAN dung beetles, colossal bees and titanic treehoppers are set to swarm into Oxford this month.

For his upcoming exhibition at Oxford University Museum of Natural History, photographer Levon Biss has blown up pictures of tiny insects in the collections to thousands of times their original size.

This glimmering iridescent orchid cuckoo bee will be several metres across, swooping over visitors' heads; the splendid-necked dung beetle will dwarf other exhibits and a tremendous treehopper may be more than the weak-stomached can handle.

Each picture in the Microsculpture exhibition is made up of 8,000 or more individual photographs and took up to three weeks to create.

Mr Biss lit and photographed each microscopic segment of every bug separately, then "stacked" the images to maintain sharp focus throughout, finally combining them into a single high-resolution file.

Every one of the insects comes from the museum's world-class entomological collection, the second largest in Britain, which includes the oldest pinned insect in the world and insects collected by Charles Darwin.

Collection curator Dr James Hogan said he was "blown away" by the incredible technique and hoped it was inspired generations of future entomologists.

Mr Biss, who is by profession a sports photographer, began his project at home near Swindon with beetles and flies his son had caught in the garden.

When he took some of his early efforts to show the entomology team at the museum, Dr Hogan said he was amazed at their detail.

He recalled: "I was immediately blown away by them - the way they were lit and the incredible amount of detail in the images."

But then he realised there were some other insects that would look even better.

Together the pair went hunting through the museum's collections of hundreds of thousands of insects looking for the perfect specimens: one with the brightest colours and most unusual shapes that could be revealed in all their glory on huge canvases.

Mr Biss very carefully packed his rucksack with two dozen tiny specimens in boxes packed with protective foam.

He spent months in his home studio, painstakingly taking thousands of photos of each.

When the photography was complete he then had to take them to a specialist printer to be hand-printed onto large canvases.

Finally, he had to find a setting grand enough to exhibit his 25 works of art, and where better than the natural history museum itself.

Mr Biss said: "James and the museum were quite excited to see these pictures, I don't think they'd seen anything quite like them before - certainly not at this scale and not in this amount of detail.

"When I saw an entomologist excited about these images, and they see a lot of pictures of insects, I knew I was onto a good thing.

"It was obvious they needed to be exhibited somehow."

Microsculpture will open in the museum's main court on Friday, May 27, and run until October 30.