Asian bees have built defences against hornet killing squads. But American bees are less well prepared. By 1843mag
o one knows how the queen first arrived in Washington state. The most likely explanation is that she found a cosy spot to spend the winter, perhaps among some cargo that was later ferried first to a commercial port in East Asia, and then across the ocean by ship. When she reached a new shore she would have been awoken, maybe by the foghorns of tugboats, by the deep thump of cranes stacking containers or the screech of gulls cutting across the grey sky.
larvae, with no protective equipment, and didn’t flee when insects began stinging. “If he had only been stung 30 times all over his body, he’d probably still be here,” said Chris Looney, an entomologist at Washington’s agriculture department. “But he was stung 80 times on the head. That’s an exceptional case.” By contrast, a nest found in Canada in 2019 lay only feet away from a popular trail. No passersby were stung.
Murder hornets – foreign agents of chaos spreading unseen to continental America – seemed like the perfect avatar for this apocalyptic year Intensive farming poses an ongoing threat to bees, too, as weed-killers and monocultures make it hard for insects to eat a varied enough diet : they need sufficient nutrients to boost their immunity against diseases and parasites such as themites. If crops are sprayed while they’re flowering, as sometimes happens, bees will also eat a lot of pesticide. Even without the arrival of a new predator, the average beekeeper loses some 40% of their hives each year.
He asked me to pump the bellows as we walked over to his remaining bee boxes. We stood on the precipice of winter and the bees were agitated as they sought to protect their honey, their source of food for the months ahead. Three pumps of smoke stupefied them. Some new arrivals, such as the European starling or Asian carp, do become pests. A study published in 2012 by theFish and Wildlife Service, a government agency, estimated that invasive species cause some $120bn-worth of damage each year, almost as much as the entire output of the country’s farms.
By the time anyone realised how much damage the tiny, spotted-wing insect could cause, it was too late: elimination was no longer an option; the only path was management. The spotted-wing fruit fly punctures soft-skinned fruit to lay its eggs, and its larvae then eat the fruit around them as they grow. As a result, bushes in this region must be sprayed with insecticide before their flowers even bud, and farmers can no longer grow organic berries.
The Asian giant hornet secretes a pheromone from a gland in its abdomen and smears this over the hive, which spells death for the bees within Since no institution had the resources to scour so much land, in February 2020 Washington’s department of agriculture announced a citizen-scientist programme to help government trappers hunt down the hornet. In the past, volunteers have successfully helped to identify noxious weeds, which can spread across thousands of acres before an untrained eye notices them.
As the only female contractor she was smaller than the others and was often sent to wriggle into tight spaces. One time, while clearing a narrow drainage pipe using her shoulder, her knee got caught in the suction hose. “I’m lucky it caught my leg and not my face,” she said. “It can pull your lungs out of your mouth in less than a second.”
Danielsen recruited 42 citizen-scientists to help set traps in the area, and many more joined after media attention on the hornets. But finding the invaders has not been easy. The west of Washington is known for its densetemperate rainforest. Vegetation proliferates in the rain, mist and fog: firs droop like overgrown beards, trees rise above brush and thick-leaved grass, invasive Himalayan brambles push out new growth over the dead stems of previous seasons.
In total, citizen scientists maintained almost two-thirds of the 2,470 registered traps. The rest were set up by the state department of agriculture around locations of confirmed sightings. Each week, Danielsen took down the trap on her property and drained its contents through a makeshift sieve – a sheet of mesh secured over the top of a tupperware pot – before dropping off the assortment of insect corpses at a designated site.