Any comic book character named after the murder hornet would have to be a villain. That’s just what it is.
At about two inches long when fully grown, the Asian giant hornets have striped bodies encased in a protective shell. Their bodies are black and orange-yellow. Their heads are dominated by large eyes and fearsome looking mandibles, which look like pliers that would hurt like heck if your finger got caught between them.
At the other end of the body is a quarter-inch stinger. It doesn’t detach, as with some bees, so the hornets can sting over and over. It’s like being, “stabbed by a red-hot needle,” Shunichi Makino, a researcher at Japan’s Forestry and Forest Products Research Institute told National Geographic.
Usually, the sting is merely painful – but it can be fatal. In Japan, an estimated 30 to 50 people die from the hornets’ stings annually, from anaphylaxis, cardiac arrest, or multiple organ failure. The hornets use their oral appendages to massacre honeybees, which are already under threat from pesticides, habitat destruction, and diseases. During the “slaughter phase,” as it’s called, murder hornets lay waste to entire beehives, decapitating the residents and harvesting the pupae for food. It’s grim, to say the least.
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Murder Hornets in North America
In Washington State, honeybees pollinate raspberries, blueberries, and other crops. That’s why experts were worried when the Asian giant hornets were spotted in the northern part of the state earlier this year. The species was first found in North America in Canada in 2019. It’s not clear how they made their way to the continent.
“It’s impossible for them to fly over from Asia,” entomologist Takatoshi Ueno, of Kyushu University, told The New York Times. One theory is that they found their way via a shipping container.
However they got here, local experts don’t want them to start multiplying. Washington entomologists went to extraordinary lengths to hunt down a hornet nest in Blaine, near the Canadian border.
Tracking and Destroying the Murder Hornets
Over the summer, entomologists lay traps to start catching the hornets. They filled plastic bottles with orange juice and other sweet-smelling liquids. A couple of the insects were found drowned. Next, the scientists put out screened traps, to catch live hornets. Washington State entomologist Chris Looney finally managed to capture a living hornet, and the team was able to glue a tracking device onto it.
In late October, Looney and his colleagues followed the tracker’s signal to the hornet nest. To ensure no insects escaped, they wrapped the entire tree in cellophane. The hornets’ long stingers meant regular beekeeping suits wouldn’t work. Instead, Looney and rest wore special foam suits. They also had goggles on.
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“I was more worried about getting permanent nerve damage in the eye from the squirted venom than being stung,” Looney told The Guardian. “They are pretty intimidating, even for an inch-and-a-half insect. They are big and loud and I know it would hurt very badly if I get stung. They give me the willies.”
This was the first removal of an Asian giant hornet nest in the U.S., but it probably won’t be the last. Scientists are modeling how the insects may spread. As large and unpleasant as the hornets are for humans, entomologists are more worried about their effect on the bees and other pollinators.
“It’s hard to say how they will behave here compared to their native range, but the fear is that there are large apiaries of bees that could be sitting ducks, while as the hornets move south to warmer weather their colonies could grow larger,” Looney said.
For more science news relating to insects, read about DNA being extracted from insects preserved in Amber and how a fossil found in Brasil uncovered the oldest meat-eating dinosaur in history.
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