Ingo Arndt: documenting the hidden lives of honeybees

Bees buzz through a hole in a tree trunk, inside which a colony of thousands has made its home. But they're not alone – they are being observed by a photographer who is seeing into the heart of their nest. This is a wild colony of western honeybees, established in wildlife photographer Ingo Arndt's back garden in Langen, Germany.

A regular category winner of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition over the years, Ingo has spent much of the past three decades capturing striking wildlife images around the world. After spending many months in the wilds of Patagonia photographing pumas, Ingo turned his attention closer to home in 2019. He's since captured thousands of fascinating macro photographs of honeybees, some of which document previously unseen behaviour.

Working with scientists and researchers, Ingo brought a colony of wild living honeybees to him, allowing him to explore their private lives in entirely new ways. Here he shares how he built one of the largest photo archives on honeybees in the world and how his Canon EOS 5DS R, Canon macro lenses and Canon Speedlites enabled him to capture his tiny, fast-moving subjects in action and reveal some truly astonishing behaviour.

Getting inside the colony

Honeybees are beloved for producing honey and pollinating a wide range of flowers, fruits and crops, but honeybee populations, like those of many insects, are seeing steep global declines. It's something that drew Ingo's attention. "You have this dying insect population," he says. "I wanted to show people the importance of wild honeybees."

Working with scientists in the forests of Germany's Hainich National Park, Ingo went to great lengths to photograph western honeybees (Apis mellifera), even climbing 20 metres up trees to reach their nests. "I quickly found out that I could take some good pictures, but the most interesting things are happening inside the nest cavity," he says. "So, I thought, 'Let's try to find a fallen tree, bring it home and put the honeybees inside'."

Freezing action with Speedlite flashes

To photograph his tiny subjects, Ingo chose a Canon EOS 5DS R for its 50.6MP resolution. He uses flash for all his pictures, including up to six Canon Speedlite 600EX II-RTs, along with ring flashes and modified softboxes.

There are a number of Canon lenses ideal for macro photography in different situations. While he owns both the Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 Macro USM and the Canon EF 100mm f/2.8L Macro IS USM lenses, for this project Ingo used the former – Image Stabilization was not needed, and it made working with the Canon Macro Twin Lite MT-24EX flash unit easier as no adapter was required.

"I used the Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 Macro USM lens a lot, and the Canon MP-E 65mm f/2.8 1-5x Macro Photo lens," he says. "This is a very important lens, because you can go close and get so much detail. I was able to shoot portraits of [individual] honeybees. Together with the flash and the camera, it gives unbelievable detail. For shooting the nest, if I had a bigger frame, I used the Canon EF 16-35mm f/4L IS USM lens and a Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L II USM lens."

An experienced macro photographer, Ingo has photographed insects across the world, from millions of Monarch butterflies in Mexico to migratory locusts in Madagascar, but it still took some experimentation for him to find the right lighting.

"The honeybees are so small and move so fast that it really isn’t possible to photograph them with natural light," he explains. "To get good results, you have to play around with the Speedlites a lot. Using many flashes together is always good, so that you have soft light from the front and backlight from the side, and you can create light around the insect's body.

"Sometimes, especially in the cavity, I was using the flashes like a spotlight, because if you use them as a wide angle, it puts light everywhere and then it looks very flat. If you use it as a spotlight, it is almost mystical, with the spotlight on the most important place."

Revealing the secret lives of bees

Over hundreds of hours, Ingo took thousands of photographs in his hide, outside the nest and in the nearby forests. "Macro photography is not very different from shooting other wildlife," he says. "You have to shoot a lot of pictures. I think I shot 80,000 pictures for this story, before selecting around 300. I had to try a lot of times before I got the perfect shot. Sometimes a good picture happens by accident, but most of the time it's a lot of work, experience and knowledge."

Within this vast body of work, Ingo has revealed a series of never-before-seen bee behaviours. Collaborating with biologist Professor Jürgen Tautz, who specialised in honeybees for around 25 years at the Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg in Germany, he documented bees duelling with attacking hornets, the members of the colony cooling the nest by regurgitating water and fanning their wings, and bees locking their legs to form "living chains" while building honeycombs.

"A lot of research focused on getting more honey out of honeybees, but almost no-one focused on the natural behaviour of the honeybee," says Ingo. "What I photographed inside the woodpecker nest cavity was never shown before. I sent my photographs to Professor Tautz and every day he found something new which had never been observed. It was amazing how many new things I could show with this story."

The pair have since published a book, Honey Bees: Mysterious Forest Dwellers, and Ingo is now building upon his stills work with a documentary film showing life inside the honeybee nest.

As international lockdowns set in at the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic, Ingo and his partner Silke were forced to return home early from a lengthy trip in Patagonia. Ingo was greeted by his colony and, thanks to his backyard bees, has been able to document wildlife without leaving his home – continuing to create a portrait of wild honeybees unlike anything seen before.