Photos from inside a tree reveal intimate lives of wild honeybees

Up to an inch and a half long, the hornet is equipped with powerful mandibles capable of shearing smaller insects to pieces.For those first few days of the siege, the honeybees appeared helpless in the face of the hornet onslaught.“I thought, Oh God, if this keeps happening, they will kill my whole colony,” says photographer Ingo Arndt, whose yard in Langen, Germany, hosts the honeybees.But as the week wore on, the bees began gaining ground. The hornet’s body temperature rises until it succumbs to the heat.The bee-versus-hornet behavior has been documented in related species in Asia and has been seen by western honeybee keepers in Israel and Egypt, but no one had ever captured the insect duel quite as Arndt had. Arndt says honeybees from nearby colonies often raid the nest in his backyard in an attempt to steal its honey, especially toward the end of summer when flowers become less available.After accompanying scientists through the forests of Germany’s Hainich National Park as they studied bees in the wild, Arndt got hooked. Even if you put on a beekeeping suit and climb 60 feet up into the forest canopy where bees like to nest, as Arndt did in 2018, “the most exciting stuff is happening inside the tree,” he says.So in February 2019, Arndt received permission from the German forest authorities to go into a local forest and remove a fallen beech tree with an abandoned black woodpecker cavity in its trunk—a treasured home for western honeybees.