Japanese Hornets Battle Honeybees

"This film about Japanese giant hornets is nightmarish but strangely beautiful. It charts the clashing fortunes of hornets and honeybees in a mountain valley. If you like your wildlife cute and cuddly, or you're phobic about stripey things that sting, steer clear; but you'll be missing something extraordinary. The narrative has the odd slow patch, but every few minutes there's an action scene to make your jaw drop: a fight to the death between a hornet and a mantis, a massacre of 30,000 honeybees by hornet warriors, bees mobbing an orchid that smells like their enemy's pheromones. The photography is so good that at times it's like watching excerpts from a sci-fi horror flick called something like War of the Wasps. The end result is hauntingly, memorably weird. Not least the scene where we see some local beekeepers tucking into a favourite snack: deep-fried hornets."

So if you don't fancy Grand Designs or the Apprentice at 9pm this evening, watch this on channel two. Natural World baby x x