Asian giant hornets are upon us: here's what you need to know about them now that they've been spotted in the U.S.
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00:00A small group of hornets, like maybe a half a dozen, a dozen hornets, can wipe out
00:03a hive in an hour and a half to two hours, so they become really effective at killing the bees.
00:30At the end of their colony cycle, so this is like late summer, early fall, when they
00:44are ramping up production of the reproductives, of the new queens that will leave the nest
00:51and start new nests, they need a lot of protein sources, and so that's when they engage in
00:55this really interesting mass attack behavior on beehives.
01:00What will happen is a hornet will mark a hive, and then her sister workers will come, and
01:05then as a group they will just catch bees, bite their heads off, throw them onto the
01:09ground, and they'll do that until the bees are no longer able to mount any kind of defense.
01:14Once that happens, they enter what's called the occupation phase, and they walk around
01:18in the hive at will and take larvae and pupae of the bees, fly it back to their own nest,
01:23and feed it to their young.
01:24It's kind of gruesome sounding.
01:25In terms of trapping, we're using the technology that's been developed, that is most widely
01:55used in Japan, which is simply orange juice and wine blended together and hung in a plastic
01:59bottle.
02:00The hornets will come and investigate it, they get stuck in the bottle and drown.
02:03It's not dissimilar to the hornet traps you might see hanging at a park or something like
02:07that.
02:08We can't use those because the holes are too small.
02:11These hornets are too big.
02:12The other approach we have available are using handheld thermal imaging cameras to find nests
02:19in the ground.
02:20When they create their nest, they will maintain the internal temperature at 86 degrees Fahrenheit,
02:26so pretty warm, certainly warmer than our soil usually is.
02:29So we're hoping to be able to use these early in the morning to locate nests once we have
02:34an idea of where it might be.
02:55They've been intercepted at ports before.
02:56We actually got a couple off of a helicopter at Fort Lewis in a military base here in Washington
03:03that had come back from overseas.
03:05Those were dead.
03:06So we do intercept them at ports occasionally, but yeah, these, to my knowledge, are the
03:10first ones that have ever been hanging out in somebody's yard.
03:20So if you get stung by one, it hurts a lot.
03:24The Conrad, in fact, the beekeeper that destroyed the nest in Nanaimo, described it as having
03:29red-hot thumbtacks shoved into his skin.
03:33If you get stung, there's always the risk of anaphylactic shock.
03:35A subset of people are truly allergic to wasp stings or hornet stings, and so a single sting
03:42for somebody like that could be very life-threatening because of their allergic response.
03:46Otherwise, it seems like the most risky human hornet encounters are when somebody stumbles
03:53upon a nest or when they're protecting a, or around a beehive that the hornets have
03:58decided to attack.
04:00When they do that, they will defend it the same as they would their own nest.
04:03And that's where you're at risk just from getting multiple stings from very large venomous
04:06insects.
04:07The venom has necrotic characteristics that can make your tissue dissolve a little bit.
04:13It can cause heart and kidney problems.
04:26Don't call it a murder hornet.
04:27Remember that they're just Asian giant hornets.
04:30They're out doing their thing.
04:31They don't really care about human beings.
04:34It's only in the very unlucky instance that you encountered one that they might sting you.
04:39If you think you've seen one, call your state department of agriculture, ideally with a
04:44photograph because that will be really helpful for us.
04:47Even if it's a negative, even if you're not sure, that's okay because the first time we
04:52find a positive, we can really ramp up our activity at that location and have a better
04:55chance of eradicating them.