2020 can buzz off already
‘Murder hornets’ continent’s latest invader
“This is our window to keep it from establishing. If we can’t do it in the next couple of years, it probably can’t be done.”
Chris Looney, entomologist
As if 2020 wasn’t terrifying enough, now we have to worry about “murder hornets.”
The world’s largest hornet — the size of a matchbox — is known for invading honeybee hives, decapitating all the bees in a matter of hours and carrying the mangled thoraxes back to feed their young.
And they’re now in the United States.
The Washington State Department of Agriculture is trying to track down Asian giant hornets after officials received and verified four reports of them in December in the northwestern part of the state.
They were also spotted in British Columbia in the fall.
In a New York Times story that made the term “murder hornets” a trending topic Saturday on Twitter, Conrad Berube, a beekeeper and entomologist in Nanaimo, described being stung by an Asian giant hornet as “like having red-hot thumbtacks being driven into my flesh.”
The hornets primarily attack insects, but will direct their aggression
toward people if they’re threatened. Their quarter-inch stingers, which can penetrate beekeeping suits, deploy a venom potent enough to dissolve human flesh.
Absorbing multiple stings can be deadly. The nervous system can shut down and an allergic reaction may occur and cause anaphylactic shock.
The insects kill 30 to 40 people each year in Japan, where they’re most common.
But the giant hornets are primarily a danger to bees. Scientists are now hunting for the insects, whose queens can grow up to two inches long, in hopes of rounding them up before they become rooted in the U.S. and destroy bee populations, which are crucial to crop pollination.
“This is our window to keep it from establishing,” Chris Looney, an entomologist at the Washington State Department of Agriculture, told the Times. “If we can’t do it in the next couple of years, it probably can’t be done.”
Some insects native to the northwestern U.S. have been confused for the invasive hornets, but real Asian giant hornets have distinctive qualities: Large orange and yellow heads with teardrop eyes, black and yellow striped abdomens and papery wings that span up to three inches.
A colony of Asian giant hornets can kill nearly 30,000 bees in a few hours.
The attack begins when a scout finds a hive and marks it with a pheromone secreted from glands in its back legs, signalling to other hornets that they should gather.
As the bees try to defend their colonies, worker hornets use powerful mandibles to chop up the bees and chew them into gooey “meatballs” before carrying the protein-heavy remains to their young.
They launch most of their attacks on bees in late summer and early fall.