How experts tracked down deadly hornets and destroyed their nest

Any comic book character named after the murderous hornet should be a villain. This is exactly what it is.

About two inches long as an adult, Asian giant hornets have striped bodies encased in a protective shell. Their body is black and orange-yellow. Their heads are dominated by large eyes and creepy mandibles, which look like pincers that would hurt if your finger got stuck between them.

At the other end of the body is a quarter-inch stinger. It doesn’t come off, like with some bees, so hornets can sting over and over again. It’s like being “stabbed by a red hot needle,” said Shunichi Makino, a researcher at the Japan Forestry and Forest Products Research Institute at National Geographic.

Usually the bite is just painful – but it can be fatal. In Japan, it is estimated that 30 to 50 people die each year from hornet bites, anaphylaxis, cardiac arrest or multiple organ failure. Hornets use their oral appendages to slaughter bees, which are already threatened by pesticides, habitat destruction and disease. During the “slaughter phase,” as it is called, the murderous hornets devastate entire hives, decapitating the inhabitants and harvesting the pupae for food. It’s dark, to say the least.

Murder of hornets in North America

In Washington state, bees pollinate raspberries, blueberries and other crops. That’s why experts worried when giant Asian hornets were spotted in the northern part of the state earlier this year. The species was first discovered in North America in Canada in 2019. It is not known how it got to the continent.

“They can’t fly over Asia,” Kyushu University entomologist Takatoshi Ueno told The New York Times. One theory is that they found their way via a shipping container.

No matter how they got here, local experts don’t want them to start multiplying. Washington entomologists went to extraordinary lengths to track down a hornet’s nest in Blaine, near the Canadian border.

Tracking and destroying deadly hornets

Over the summer, entomologists set traps to start catching hornets. They filled plastic bottles with orange juice and other fragrant liquids. Some insects were found drowned. Next, scientists set up wire traps to catch live hornets. Washington state entomologist Chris Looney eventually managed to capture a live hornet, and the team were able to stick a tracking device on it.

In late October, Looney and his colleagues followed the tracker’s signal to the hornet’s nest. To make sure no bugs escaped, they wrapped the entire tree in cellophane. The hornets’ long stingers meant regular beekeeping suits wouldn’t work. Instead, Looney and the rest wore special foam suits. They also wore glasses.

“I was more worried about getting permanent nerve damage in my eye from the spurted venom than being stung,” Looney told The Guardian. “They’re pretty intimidating, even for an inch and a half insect. They are big and loud and I know it would hurt a lot if I got bitten. They give me the willies.

This was the first removal of a giant Asian hornet’s nest in the United States, but it likely won’t be the last. Scientists are modeling how insects can spread. As big and unpleasant as hornets are to humans, entomologists are more concerned about their effect on bees and other pollinators.

“It’s hard to say how they’ll behave here compared to their original range, but the fear is that there are large beehives that could be sitting ducks, while the hornets move around. to the south in warmer weather their colonies could get bigger, ”Looney told me.

For more scientific information on insects, read about DNA extracted from insects preserved in amber, and how a fossil discovered in Brazil discovered the oldest carnivorous dinosaur in history.