The death's-head hawkmoth is a honey specialist among adult moths. It enters honeybee nests, pierces sealed comb with a short stout proboscis, and drinks. Its cuticle is thick enough to resist many stings, and it appears to carry a chemical profile that reduces the response it provokes from guard bees, though it is sometimes killed inside hives.
The squeak is produced differently from most insect sounds. Rather than rubbing body parts together, the moth draws air in through its pharynx against a stiffened epipharyngeal flap and expels it, producing a pulse train several hundred milliseconds long and clearly audible to a person. Caterpillars and pupae also produce sounds, by different means.
A long-standing story holds that the squeak mimics the piping of a queen bee and pacifies the colony. That explanation is repeatedly asserted and poorly supported. Chemical mimicry of hive odours has better evidence than acoustic mimicry, and the squeak is also given when the moth is seized by a vertebrate, which points towards a general startle function.