Posted on 05/02/2020 3:55:24 PM PDT by Berlin_Freeper
A species of Asian "murder hornets" has appeared in the U.S. as researchers search for ways to eradicate the vicious insects before populations grow.
The hornets were discovered near Custer, Wash., last November when beekeeper Ted McFall found carcasses of his bees with decapitated heads, according to an interview with The New York Times.
McFall told the Times that he could not imagine what could have killed his bees, later discovering that it was the result of a murder hornet attack.
The Asian hornets are reportedly enormous, with queens growing as long as two inches.
(Excerpt) Read more at thehill.com ...
From what I have heard about them...one or two can wipe out a hive of bees. Sometimes the bees wound it...then the bees pile all around the hornet and beat their wings ferociously to raise their body temp and kill the hornet by heat.
We used to ride our Schwinn’s behind the DDT Fogger Trucks in the mid-50s, and bathe in the clouds of it.
No ill effects.
My grandmother’s home had a nest of hornets under the sidewalk in the back of her house. The structure sat on a lot that pitched down several feet until reaching the alley. The grade dropped off abruptly just past a sidewalk paralleling the back wall of the house, that showed some erosion at the edge, and the opportunistic hornets had built up a nest somewhere underneath this appealing part of the sidewalk.
I dispatched the hornets departing the nest, one at a time using a tennis racket’s stringed face. If you missed on the first swing, and riled up the hornet, you could dice the attacking hornet into multiple pieces with an unexpected but deadly backhand.
It’s great sport because it boils down to- you getting the hornet or the hornet getting you.
“We’ve got around 4,000 species of native bee’s here in the US, the Honey Bee isn’t one of them”
That’s really interesting. Are other bees suffering colony collapse too?
In the past it was FIRE ANTS, then Killer Bees, now “murder hornets”!
Time to watch Hellstrom Chronicles (1971) again.
I’ve used a shop vac with a long extension tube for flying critters with stingers.
I think these Hornets are mainly from Japan. I know there are a lot of videos of Japanese exterminators on youtube about them.
After moving to a new home as boys, we used our BB guns and pellet guns to shoot up the wasp nests high in the backyard cypress trees down by the lake. Otherwise, the backyard would be so infested with the damn creatures that it could not be played in. Even with precautions, we still got stung several times a year. When you are twelve years old, those are good times — and remain so in memory decades later.
I was reading in the book about Joseph Walker, who was an active frontiersman and explorer for almost 50 years, that the honey bee was imported. The book said that the Indians called the honey bee the white man’s fly.
I agree with you on that. Asian hornets are no joke. Just a few can destroy a bee colony in an afternoon. And those things have stingers that are almost a quarter-inch long. I’ve seen some great videos on youtube of people taking out pesky hornet nets, but not many for taking the Asian variety down.
The best video I saw had a guy in a hazmat suit put a tub of water under a nest hanging under the eaves of a house. Then he took a powerful water hose and first made the nest wet so that it sealed itself up. That trapped just about the entire hornet swarm. Then he upped the pressure and the whole thing fell into the tub. Then he swatted any that were in the locale with a tennis racket into the tub of water.
There are some ingenious folks out there who devise diverse and effective ways of taking out hornet and yellowjacket nests.
I think a lot of honey bee queens are still imported.
Yeah! FOR REALS! I’ve read they are called “great sparrow bees” in Japan and “tiger-head bees” in China.
Honey bees in Asia are on to them and have a technique called “balling” where they swarm a scout hornet and kill it through suffocation and over-heating before it can emit a pheremone warning to other Asian hornets.
American and European honeybees, while better honey producers than Asian honeybees, aren’t as good at defending themselves from Asian hornets. Japanese honey producers would rather have American bees producing for them, but they fall prey to Asian hornets too easily.
I wonder what a matchup between Asian hornets and Africanized “killer” bees would be like?
Yeah, unless that thing is dead, I don’t know how you can hold one!
I was just wondering if Coyote Peterson had already “researched” this. That’s one crazy dude.
If he does those youtube videos, I’m pretty sure he did.
I counted 6 bees flying pollinating my Horminum Sage Flowers this afternoon.
If we are going to blow trillions of dollars, I would rather use it to eradicate those monsters than spend it delaying the Wuhan Flu.
There was an entomologist named Justin O. Schmidt who did the same thing that Coyote Preston is doing. Only Schmidt actually recorded the pains of the stings he took and developed an index of pain that rated each insect that stung him. Read more about it!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schmidt_sting_pain_index
Evidently, Tarantula Hawks, native to the US Southwest, are near the very top.
oh no. it’s another “all the bees are dying” alarm. must implement global warming measures post haste.
Back to your houses!!!!!
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