The Rush to Stop the Asian Giant Hornet | Hacker News Reader

The Rush to Stop the Asian Giant Hornet

nytimes.com

99 pointsAndrewBissell40 comments

I learned that to defend themselves, some bees pile up on the hornets and vibrate, generating enough heat to cook them to death [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbMLzSMJ12U

Asian honeybees do that, european honeybees don’t have that skill :(

This is exceptionally bad. European honeybees are no match for suzumebachi. Asian honey bees can kill them, but Asian honey bees have a dramatically lower yield of honey. 500 ml (a pint) of honey costs me up to $20 in Japan.

I'm 90% confident I saw one of these hornets in upstate NY a couple years ago.

It was active at night, I thought I heard an electric short somewhere on my porch and that's when I looked up and saw it flying between beams.

A few weeks later we find a dead mouse on the back porch. I was about to go remove it when its head slowly lifted up, then back down. So I thought maybe it was still alive but as I watched it more, it appeared something was actually inside the mouse, eating it from the inside out.

A couple days later I find the large hornet on the front steps, dead. I wish I would have taken a picture in hindsight.

A few weeks later I was pretty sure I saw another during daytime flying past me in the yard. Could have been a cicada killer wasp though, as the cicadas were out at this time too.

I don't think 30 to 50 people currently die due to stings from Asian Giant Hornets in Japan. At least not according to these statistics http://www2u.biglobe.ne.jp/~vespa/vespa0562.htm

Wasps and Hornets are just as deadly in the USA https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/68/wr/mm6829a5.htm

They are probably mistaking it for velutina, that is killing around 20 people/year only in Europe yet.

The wasps and hornets we have in North Anerica don’t chase you half a mile and sting you to death quite as much. Nor do their stings leave quite the same large scars. Our CDC stats didn’t say whether the decendent was allergic. Ordinary yellowjackets can force us out of their territory in my local parks, I really don’t want the AGH’s getting a toehold.

Needs more details on the tagging traps along with any suits that are too thick to get pierced by their stingers.

Intellectual Ventures has shown off a prototype laser detection and kill system (photonic fence) for mosquitoes many years ago; it can differentiate between male and female mosquitos by wing flapping rate, and if a female mosquito, increases power to kill the target. I am curious if such hardware could be repurposed for defending honeybee hives from these hornets, at least those under the control of humans.

https://www.fastcompany.com/3059127/what-happened-to-the-mos...

A camera and some machine learning could probably detect when a bee hive is being attacked by one of these.

You want to kill the hornet before it can make its way to the hive(s).

Plague, meet pestilence.

Well, rather those than famine or war.

Give it time, give it time.

We've had famine and war for as long as I can remember. Pretty sure plague and pestilence are the late comers to this party.

Meat agriculture, climate change, globalization, and airline travel will initiate the crash.

Killer bees are not pestilence. That category is reserved for locust swarms.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%9320_locust_infesta...

You are technically correct, the best kind of correct.

And what term would the ancients have given to a plague of hornets?

The many facets of carrying capacity population dynamics--

"The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction, and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and tens of thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world." — Thomas Malthus, 1798. An Essay on the Principle of Population

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Africanized_bee

I was once alone in a forest in Japan, covered in sweat due to the weather and hiking all day, when a giant hornet landed on me and apparently collected some salt off my T-shirt. I stood there completely frozen for what felt like ten minutes until it was done.

Only later did I learn that their sting can be fatal.

If they start mating with bats and pangolins, we're really screwed.

I thing that you are taking the bees and flowers tales too literary, but If there is such thing as a waspolin, I want one.

Reminds me of a hike I did near Camden ME mid-afternoon that took me quickly up a hillside to the top of a cliff with incredible views over a lake.

When I turned around to come back there were literally snakes everywhere. Or at least about every fifty feet, and all of them only on the path back down and nowhere else.

No one else around, no cell reception, and my first time in Maine ever. I assumed they were deadly and so every sun bathing snake meant I had to find a route off the path into the woods and back out. It was rocky and I risked snapping an ankle or, I guessed, treading on a hidden snake. I had to do this about twenty times in total on the way back to the trailhead and it was terrifying.

When I finally got online I found out they were Eastern garter snakes. Primary attack: run away. Secondary attack: spray a bad smell.

That’s funny. One of the many joys of living in Maine is enjoying the outdoors free from the worry of venomous snakes.

I once fed one, but only the european sort. But it was as large as the one on the pictures there, just not in that red-black war paint. Actually rather strange when i think about it. While taking an afternoon nap i awoke because of some loud buzzing, like when you're holding a piece of paper into a fan. I couldn't see what it was, so i got up and searched. There was the largest one i've ever seen, captured between the window and the inner window blinds, bouncing madly back and forth between the glass, and the bamboo blinds. What to do? I've been afraid of it, first opened the door to the balcony as wide as possible, then slowly pulling the blinds back into the room. Stupid thing wouldn't notice, banging even more furiously against the glass. For whatever reason it came into my mind that i should feed it, but what? Then i picked a raisin out of some müesli, put it on top of a long needle (which i had to search for, when do i ever sew?) and held it slowly trough the gap between windowframe and blinds. The hornet came, landed on the blinds, crawled to the raisin and gnawed on it. For about two to three minutes i could see the raisin slowly shrink. Then it was gone, just the sharp tip of the needle, nothing left over. The hornet made movements like gymnastics for a while, 30 seconds or so, somehow 'prancing'? And then the strangest thing happened: without bumping against anything it flew out between the gap, hovered maybe a meter before my head, did a slow circle of maybe half a meter and SHOT out of the balcony door whith a loud hum.

I felt joy and perplexed at the same time. WHY it didn't do that sooner? And WHY T F i had the idea of feeding it with a raisin?

Where I live has WNV, Lyme disease, black bears, black widow spiders (thousands in wood piles), Africanized honey bees, forest fires, 40m/120 ft tall leaning dead trees, rolling power outages, impoverished homeless people, meth dealers, AR15-armed conspiracy wingnuts, and porch pirates. The squirrels, hummingbirds, finches, turkeys, deer, and crows are mostly cool, except for the occasional plague, anthrax, rabies, avian flu, and hantavirus, and bugging me to refill the sugar water and suet.

time to search and destroy. lets not have another fucking killer bee fiasco.

Oh first it was "Africanized Bees", and now it's "Asian Giant Hornets", what's next "Russian Communist Ants"? Everything that's bad, must come from afar. There be dragons yo.

(j/k)

Killer bees, redux? Only now do I realize it was all bullshit.

The fact that some risks don’t bite us is not a reason to ignore risks.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/14/a-failure-but-not-of-p...

What was bullshit about killer bees?

The name and what was made of the story.

"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."

Is this warfare?

Extremely unlikely. Unintentional introductions happen all the time. Someone imports something, and a species comes along. It's even known to have happened because someone imports nothing — empty ships need ballast, and the most conveniently available ballast for a ship is water. So sea species are picked up near port X and transported to port Y.

There's such a lot of trade in the world.

In this case, whoever ordered a doodah from Japan may have ordered eleventy thousand, and a couple of them came with an unintentional extra.

For instance the introduction of Asian hornets (vespa velutina, not the giant one) in Europe was traced back to a single shipment of Chinese pottery to the South-West of France in 2004. Apparently one queen is enough to invade an entire continent. The lack of genetic diversity hasn't stopped them to spread to Spain, Italy and so on.

Dismissing the advice of biologists and doing nothing for years about it, until it was too late was definitely a Sarkozy major fiasco. The first two years it token french by surprise, it was understandable, but the lack of measures and comptempt by the conservationist voices after that, was unjustifiable. Spanish politicians didn't practically anything for almost 10 years about it of course, until a politician relative was killed at 32 Yo.

Now is in most France, half of Spain and some locations in Portugal and Germany, and is causing economical damage by millions and killing several people each year. For a decade I didn't hear none of those holy cow economists just mention the problem

One queen is enough to invade an entire continent is a thrilling use of language. Horrifying too, as is so much of this subject. Our innate fear of dangerous animals and how easy it can be used to provoke is a very exciting idea to explore. Time to watch Aliens again.

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