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"Ladies and Gentlemen, We Made It": The First Nest of Killer Hornets Found in America at Last

2020-10-24T14:53:51.298Z


After attaching a tracker to a specimen trapped days ago, Washington authorities celebrated the discovery. What do they plan to do with the hideout.


10/24/2020 11:46 AM

  • Clarín.com

  • International

  • United States

Updated 10/24/2020 11:46 AM

Back in April 2020, the year was bad enough for the coronavirus pandemic in the United States when the country began to add another concern: the appearance of a terrifying insect dubbed the

"Asian killer hornet."

They had been seen for the first time in December 2019 in the state of Washington and during the last months they caused damage without anyone being able to control them.

Only at the beginning of this month of October they were able to capture one alive.

Now, after tracking it down, the authorities finally found the first nest of this dangerous species.

Scientists and officials discovered the hideout and

plan to eradicate it

this Saturday to protect native bees.

Workers at the state Department of Agriculture spent weeks searching, trapping and

flossing

to tie tracking devices to giant Asian hornets, whose sting is extremely painful but whose real threat is to

bees that pollinate crops.

The scientists used dental floss to install a tracker on a killer hornet caught days ago, and thus managed to reach the nest.

"Ladies and gentlemen, we succeeded," said the spokeswoman for that organization, 

Karla Salp,

in statements to the press. Bad weather conditions delayed plans to destroy the nest on Friday, which

was found in Blaine

, a city at north of Seattle.

The honeycomb is about the size of a basketball and

contains between 100 and 200 hornets

, according to the scientists, who suspected it was in the area since invading insects began to appear late last year.

Authorities have not said how the hornets got to North America.

Despite the nickname and the fears generated in an already gloomy year, the largest hornet in the world

kills a maximum of ten people a year

in Asian countries.

By comparison, common hornets, wasps and bees in the United States kill an average of 62 people a year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but their population is vastly larger than that of killer hornets.

One of the traps set to track down killer hornets.

Contains orange juice for ferocious insects to get close.

The real threat from the giant Asian hornets - which are about 2 inches tall - is their devastating attacks on bees, which are already being decimated by problems such as mites, disease, pesticides and food loss.

A small group of Asian hornets

can kill an entire hive in hours

and have already destroyed six or seven in Washington state, officials said.

Using dental floss, "entomologists were able to connect radio trackers to three hornets, the second of which led to the discovery of the nest" on Thursday, agriculture officials said.

One of the killer hornets, with its tracker installed on its belly.

Thus they finally reached the nest.

"A person from the

Blaine

area

reported several sightings of Asian giant hornets. Two specimens were collected and another was photographed attacking a hornet's nest," the institution wrote on its Facebook account two weeks ago when the first was caught alive. 

In 2013, between July and October, the insects killed 41 people and injured 1,600 in Shaanxi province, Japan, the BBC reported.

Jun-ichi Takahashi, a researcher at Kyoto Sangyo University in Japan, explained that

group attacks by wasps can expose their victims to doses of venom equivalent to that of a snake.

Source: clarin

All news articles on 2020-10-24

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