
The Rush to Stop the Asian Giant Hornet - AndrewBissell
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/02/us/asian-giant-hornet-washington.html
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gao8a
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbMLzSMJ12U)

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

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mikekchar
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.

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dustinls
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.

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barbegal
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](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](https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/68/wr/mm6829a5.htm)

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quantified
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.

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

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toomuchtodo
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...](https://www.fastcompany.com/3059127/what-happened-to-the-mosquito-
zapping-laser-that-was-going-to-stop-malaria)

~~~
Buttons840
A camera and some machine learning could probably detect when a bee hive is
being attacked by one of these.

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

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seemslegit
Plague, meet pestilence.

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

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%9320_locust_infesta...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%9320_locust_infestation)

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

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based2
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Africanized_bee](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Africanized_bee)

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adrianN
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.

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gorgoiler
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.

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throwaway20148
That’s funny. One of the many joys of living in Maine is enjoying the outdoors
free from the worry of venomous snakes.

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

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mg794613
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)

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

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ubercow13
What was bullshit about killer bees?

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blast
The name and what was made of the story.

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Lammy
"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?

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Arnt
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.

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hocuspocus
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.

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pvaldes
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

