‘Murder hornets’ reach North America
Vicious giant Asian pest, spotted in U.S., a threat for bee populations
BLAINE, WASH.— 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, Wash., 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,” McFall said.
Only later did he come to suspect 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.
In Japan, the hornets kill up to 50 people a year. Now, for the first time, they have arrived in the United States.
Scientists have since embarked on a full-scale hunt for the hornets, worried 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.”
Looney went out on a recent day in Blaine, carrying clear jugs made into makeshift traps. 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.
If a hornet does get caught in a trap, 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.