Hornet Catches Honeybee

Occurred on August 16, 2024 / Dohr, Eifel, Germany

Info from Licensor: "Last summer I also spent time observing, photographing and filming social wasps in my garden in Dohr (in the Eifel region) in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. I spent hundreds of hours observing and arranging until the animals got used to me (and I got used to them) and then I managed to take some extraordinary pictures.

Honey bees, wasps, field wasps and hornets gather at a drinking trough filled with water or sugar water and enjoy drinking the energizing liquid. Especially in the fall, when the insect colonies are slowly approaching their annual end and the last workers have already hatched, various species gather here.

The largest and dominant species is the hornet. Like all social wasps, it feeds its larvae with animal protein, which it normally obtains by hunting other insects. Honey bees are easy and popular prey for hornets. They catch them at a feeding site or in flight. When hunting in flight, the hornets spread their legs to form a kind of catching basket and grab the bees with their strong, powerful mouthparts, the mandibles. They then often land with them on a thin branch and hang themselves there with one leg. They use their other legs to hold the prey in place and bite off the bee's head, then its wings and extremities. The abdomen is also bitten off and dropped. Only the middle body segment with the flight muscles is utilized. It is chewed into a food pulp. The hornet then flies to its nest and feeds the food mash to its larvae.

The whole process is part of the natural cycle. It does not normally harm the bee colonies, because in late summer their colonies have reached the highest number of individuals and many worker bees die around this time anyway.

Photographing and filming this hunt is anything but easy and requires a great deal of experience. Many nature lovers have observed this hunt before. But you just don't know beforehand when and where it will take place. The hunt itself only lasts a few seconds before the hornet flies off with its prey. In this very short time, the camera has to be positioned, the right parameters have to be set, the light and location have to be right and you have to react quickly enough. It took me many years and hundreds of hours of observation before I was able to film such scenes.
But in the meantime I have managed to capture many such shots, which can be seen on my YouTube channel. My shots are often bought up by film and TV productions, as only a few nature photographers specialize in this and many of my shots are unique."