[AG-EQ] ‘Murder Hornets’ in the U.S.: The Rush to Stop the Asian Giant Hornet

[dogwood farm]

‘Murder Hornets’ in the U.S.: The Rush to Stop the Asian Giant Hornet
By Mike Baker
Published May 2, 2020Updated May 3, 2020

Sightings of the Asian giant hornet have prompted fears that the
vicious insect could establish itself in the United States and
devastate bee populations.

“This is our window to keep it from establishing,” Chris Looney, a
Washington State entomologist, said of the two-inch Asian giant
hornet. He displayed a dead hornet on his jacket.

BLAINE, Washington. — In his decades of beekeeping, Ted McFall had
never seen anything like it.

As he pulled his truck up to check on a group of hives near Custer,
Washington, in November, he could spot from the window a mess of bee
carcasses on the ground. As he looked closer, he saw a pile of dead
members of the colony in front of a hive and more carnage inside —
thousands and thousands of bees with their heads torn from their
bodies and no sign of a culprit.

“I couldn’t wrap my head around what could have done that,” Mr. McFall said.

Only later did he come to suspect that the killer was what some
researchers simply call the “murder hornet.”

With queens that can grow to two inches long, Asian giant hornets can
use mandibles shaped like spiked shark fins to wipe out a honeybee
hive in a matter of hours, decapitating the bees and flying away with
the thoraxes to feed their young. For larger targets, the hornet’s
potent venom and stinger — long enough to puncture a beekeeping suit —
make for an excruciating combination that victims have likened to hot
metal driving into their skin.

In Japan, the hornets kill up to 50 people a year. Now, for the first
time, they have arrived in the United States.

Mr. McFall still is not certain that Asian giant hornets were
responsible for the plunder of his hive. But two of the predatory
insects were discovered last fall in the northwest corner of
Washington State, a few miles north of his property — the first
sightings in the United States.

Scientists have since embarked on a full-scale hunt for the hornets,
worried that the invaders could decimate bee populations in the United
States and establish such a deep presence that all hope for
eradication could be lost.

“This is our window to keep it from establishing,” said Chris Looney,
an entomologist at the Washington State Department of Agriculture. “If
we can’t do it in the next couple of years, it probably can’t be
done.”

On a cold morning in early December, two and a half miles to the north
of Mr. McFall’s property, Jeff Kornelis stepped on his front porch
with his terrier-mix dog. He looked down to a jarring sight: “It was
the biggest hornet I’d ever seen.”

The insect was dead, and after inspecting it, Mr. Kornelis had a hunch
that it might be an Asian giant hornet. It did not make much sense,
given his location in the world, but he had seen an episode of the
YouTube personality Coyote Peterson getting a brutal sting from one of
the hornets.

Beyond its size, the hornet has a distinctive look, with a
cartoonishly fierce face featuring teardrop eyes like Spider-Man,
orange and black stripes that extend down its body like a tiger, and
broad, wispy wings like a small dragonfly.

Mr. Kornelis contacted the state, which came out to confirm that it
was indeed an Asian giant hornet. Soon after, they learned that a
local beekeeper in the area had also found one of the hornets.

Dr. Looney said it was immediately clear that the state faced a
serious problem, but with only two insects in hand and winter coming
on, it was nearly impossible to determine how much the hornet had
already made itself at home.

Over the winter, state agriculture biologists and local beekeepers got
to work, preparing for the coming season. Ruthie Danielsen, a
beekeeper who has helped organize her peers to combat the hornet,
unfurled a map across the hood of her vehicle, noting the places
across Whatcom County where beekeepers have placed traps.

“Most people are scared to get stung by them,” Ms. Danielsen said.
“We’re scared that they are going to totally destroy our hives.”

Adding to the uncertainty — and mystery — were some other discoveries
of the Asian giant hornet across the border in Canada.

In November, a single hornet was seen in White Rock, British Columbia,
perhaps 10 miles away from the discoveries in Washington State —
likely too far for the hornets to be part of the same colony. Even
earlier, there had been a hive discovered on Vancouver Island, across
a strait that probably was too wide for a hornet to have crossed from
the mainland.

Crews were able to track down the hive on Vancouver Island. Conrad
Bérubé, a beekeeper and entomologist in the town of Nanaimo, was
assigned to exterminate it.

He set out at night, when the hornets would be in their nest. He put
on shorts and thick sweatpants, then his bee suit. He donned Kevlar
braces on his ankles and wrists.

But as he approached the hive, he said, the rustling of the brush and
the shine of his flashlight awakened the colony. Before he had a
chance to douse the nest with carbon dioxide, he felt the first
searing stabs in his leg — through the bee suit and underlying
sweatpants.

“It was like having red-hot thumbtacks being driven into my flesh,” he
said. He ended up getting stung at least seven times, some of the
stings drawing blood.

Jun-ichi Takahashi, a researcher at Kyoto Sangyo University in Japan,
said the species had earned the “murder hornet” nickname there because
its aggressive group attacks can expose victims to doses of toxic
venom equivalent to that of a venomous snake; a series of stings can
be fatal.

The night he got stung, Mr. Bérubé still managed to eliminate the nest
and collect samples, but the next day, his legs were aching, as if he
had the flu. Of the thousands of times he has been stung in his
lifetime of work, he said, the Asian giant hornet stings were the most
painful.

After collecting the hornet in the Blaine area, state officials took
off part of a leg and shipped it to an expert in Japan. A sample from
the Nanaimo nest was sent as well.

A genetic examination, concluded over the past few weeks, determined
that the nest in Nanaimo and the hornet near Blaine were not
connected, said Telissa Wilson, a state pest biologist, meaning there
had probably been at least two different introductions in the region.

Dr. Looney went out on a recent day in Blaine, carrying clear jugs
that had been made into makeshift traps; typical wasp and bee traps
available for purchase have holes too small for the Asian giant
hornet. He filled some with orange juice mixed with rice wine, others
had kefir mixed with water, and a third batch was filled with some
experimental lures — all with the hope of catching a queen emerging to
look for a place to build a nest.

He hung them from trees, geo-tagging each location with his phone.

In a region with extensive wooded habitats for hornets to establish
homes, the task of finding and eliminating them is daunting. How to
find dens that may be hidden underground? And where to look, given
that one of the queens can fly many miles a day, at speeds of up to 20
miles per hour?

The miles of wooded landscapes and mild, wet climate of western
Washington State makes for an ideal location for the hornets to
spread.

In the coming months, Mr. Looney said, he and others plan to place
hundreds more traps. State officials have mapped out the plan in a
grid, starting in Blaine and moving outward.

The buzz of activity inside a nest of Asian giant hornets can keep the
inside temperature up to 86 degrees, so the trackers are also
exploring using thermal imaging to examine the forest floors. Later,
they may also try other advanced tools that could track the signature
hum the hornets make in flight.

If a hornet does get caught in a trap, Dr. Looney said, there are
plans to possibly use radio-frequency identification tags to monitor
where it goes — or simply attach a small streamer and then follow the
hornet as it returns to its nest.

While most bees would be unable to fly with a disruptive marker
attached, that is not the case with the Asian giant hornet. It is big
enough to handle the extra load.
Susan
dogwoodfarm62 at gmail.com