I’ve known Norm Baker for the last decade. He always has thoughtful information to share. While this is a comment in another post, I wanted to break it out to share more fully.
I am trained as an entomologist and am aware of the murder hornet and have been for many years. If this hornet becomes established and, that is quite likely, it will be a problem because of anaphylactic shock from the sting. When a hornet or yellowjacket or paper wasp sting, it isn’t a single injection. It is more like five or six injections in a very short row to get the maximum benefit or pain. Anaphylactic shock will be a matter of public safety and it may be necessary to broaden the purview of public safety a bit. I say this because being trained as an entomologist, I have seen two people go into anaphylactic shock after years, many years of working with insects and suddenly becoming susceptible to the sting or other insect protein. In one case, a 50-year-old woman researcher in the lab next to mine at U of M, had a cockroach run up her arm and she developed tiny red marks where the animal ran. A couple of months later, a cockroach escaped a culture cage, she grabbed it and put it back in. 20 minutes later she went into anaphylactic shock and if the lab technician and a couple of students had not been present, she would have died. In another case, a 55-year-old man who had worked with honeybees is entire professional life was so used to being stung, he simply ignored them. Unfortunately, he and a student were in the field and he got that one sting too many and started gasping for breath. If his graduate student had not been there, he would have died. Data on anaphylactic shock from insect stings, shows that 90% of the time, it looks like the person suffered a heart attack.
I read over the paper on where the Asian giant hornet can be expected to live and it is most of the Pacific Northwest. I can also tell from the eradication efforts by the Department of Agriculture, that all of their efforts still do not tell us if it is possible to control this animal. The problem is the fall dispersal of those queen hornets. They go into a kind of hibernation and in the spring, set up housekeeping very quickly and build a nest very quickly. My experience as an entomologist says this will eventually be a low level problem here in Clallam County. But, it will also take some training for EMTs and I can just about guarantee some of you police people are going to get involved indirectly because of the anaphylactic shock.
A lot of press time is devoted to the devastating effects of these hornets on bee colonies. What I have not seen is the use of a screen “excluder” that prevents the hornets from entering a beehive simply because they are much larger in size. It will simply be a matter of time before the nations beekeepers learn how to handle this hornet around their hives. The real concern here is anaphylactic shock that is passed off as a heart attack when no help is present and someone is stung.
But, there is more to the murder hornet then people really realize in this country.
For example take a look at this article; https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/05/world/asia/murder-hornet-japan.html
Or even Wikipedia – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_giant_hornet
Norm Baker, PhD
Filed under: Clallam County, Environmental Science, Jefferson County, Olympic Peninsula, Puget Sound | Tagged: Asian giant hornet, bees, Murder hornet, shock |
The video showed the hornets emerging from a cavity in a tree. Do they nest in the ground also?
Apparently so. Yes.
Al, thanks for the added dimension to the story. Although it was informative, I have one bone to pick with Norm Baker’s context: he justifies his focus on the human aspect of the problem by saying, “The real concern here is anaphylactic shock…” as if there is only one “real” concern and all the rest are imaginary. We live in an ecosystem, and such an oversimplification marginalizes the big picture. If I understand correctly, we’ve seen dramatic reductions in pollinators, and we need a big increase in natural bee populations. I’m no geneticist, but I suspect that it would take decades, or maybe centuries or millennia, for local honey bees to evolve to the point where they learn how to build “excluder” screens to keep out the murder hornets 🙂
John, thanks for this. I think the point that Norm was making on the screens was that beekeepers could put the screens on to possibly protect commercial hives (obviously wild honey bees will be very negatively affected). And yes, the destruction of the ecosystem of pollinators is probably a much greater concern than people getting stung, in terms of total destruction this insect can create. From what I’ve read the hornets are normally not aggressive. However, since they do live in the ground, this could create a very large amount of people who get stung.