If You Ever Spot A Giant Murder Hornet, Here’s Why You Should Report It Right Away

No one really knows how these murder hornets came to the U.S. This particular species of insect is, after all, typically native to parts of Japan, China, South Korea, Vietnam and Thailand. All the same, sightings of this fearsome creature have now been made in Whatcom, Washington, and further north in Canada’s British Columbia. So what makes their presence such a great concern?

Not only are they the largest insects of their kind, these hornets can pose a threat to humans. The wasp’s sting can cause serious health problems or even death if the recipient is allergic or subjected to a sustained attack. But that risk is small compared to wider concerns about the hornet invasion. Yep, these little critters have another target in their sights.

It’s a threat that Custer, Washington, beekeeper Ted McFall witnessed first-hand in November 2019. As he described to The New York Times newspaper in May 2020, “As I drove into the bee yard I could see from afar kind of a dark shadow in front of one of my beehives. I thought, ‘Oh, I wonder what that is?’” It was what he could only describe as “carnage.”

McFall saw a scene that could have been lifted from a Hollywood slasher flick. But where he saw devastation, another’s encounter with the menacing hornet was far more docile. In fact a Japanese man identified only as Twitter user Mikuru625 claimed to have captured one of the wasps and kept it as a pet in 2014.

According to the website of British newspaper the Daily Mail, the Tokyo resident used a butterfly net to capture the insect. He then gripped the hornet with a set of tweezers so as to remove its stinger and venom-filled sacs. Once he’d gently tied a piece of string around the critter’s neck as a harness, he claimed to take the insect on “walks” – perhaps “flies” – and treat it as a pet.

As “Mikuru625” described, “He does bite occasionally but it doesn’t really hurt.” Twitter users, though, were generally cynical, with suspicions that the creature may have already expired. As one user noted, “These hornets are the nastiest, most aggressive insects in the world. Even without a sting they'd try to bite you to death. There’s no way they could be pets.” They perhaps had a point.

According to the Live Science website, the Vespa mandarinia – or Asian giant hornet, to give its common name – is fearsome. It has a disproportionately large stinger for its thumb-sized body, with a poisonous jab. Its potential to grow up to 2 inches in length makes it the largest hornet in the world. But more than that, its attack can be fatal.

That’s right: as if its appearance wasn’t terrifying enough, its sting is venomous. If someone happened to be allergic to the poison, or was subjected to multiple stings, the result could be anything from organ failure to the killing-off of body tissue and even death. It should be stressed, though, that such cases are rare.

According to the federal U.S. agency Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 62 people succumb to the effects of regular wasp and bee stings in the U.S. every year. This compares to roughly a dozen who perish from Asian giant hornet stings in their homeland. So, as Sven-Erik Spichiger, who works at the Washington Department of Agriculture as an entomologist, made clear, “These are not going to hunt you down and murder you.”

Still, it’s a species that has migrated from its natural home in Asia over the last couple of years to the Pacific Northwest region of the U.S. The insect is identifiable not only by its 2-inch frame, but also its orange-toned head, black-and-yellow striped body, and jaws similar to an ant’s. And yet no one really understands how the hornets found a home in Washington.

It’s possible that the state’s new insect residents landed there via cargo ship. As The New York Times contributor Mike Baker explained, “Well, they didn’t fly here. There’s a lot of open questions about how it happened. I think the most common theory seems to be some sort of connection to international trade.”

He continued, “So did one of these queens end up at the bottom of a ship somewhere where there was enough dirt for them to establish themselves, or did they go into their base of the right bonsai tree that was going to come across the ocean and get sold at some nursery somewhere? That seems like the theory most likely to the researchers who are following this.”

Whichever way the Asian giant hornet arrived in the area, it found what Spichiger described as the “perfect” habitat in the Pacific Northwest. You see, the insect thrives in the area’s muddy woodlands, and loves low-altitude, wet climates. So Washington turned out to be a great place for the invasive species to set up a new home.

According to Baker, the first indication of Asian giant hornets residing in the state came in November 2019. First there was the mysterious incident that happened to McFall, which we mentioned earlier. Then weeks later, not too far away, a gentleman got the fright of his life when he stepped onto his porch and saw what he suspected was a terrifyingly large hornets’ nest below.

Having seen a YouTube video about Asian giant hornets, the man feared that this nest had been constructed by these little creatures. It was enough of a hunch for him to look into the subject further. And when word of his research reached the state authorities, they sent experts on invasive species around to investigate. They confirmed precisely what was on the man’s property: a giant Asian hornets’ nest.

The insects were soon dubbed “murder hornets” by the media, who began stoking fear of the creatures. But with no actual sighting of a live insect and it posing minimal risk to humans should they come across one, what was the hysteria about? Well, according to the Northeastern News website, fear of the hornet is largely driven by visual cues that feed the imagination.

Ajay Satpute studies fear and is an assistant professor of psychology at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. He believes that overblown coverage of the hornets in the Washington area by various media outlets has stoked people’s anxiety. For instance, although a person may have no experience of being stung by a hornet, they get a sense that they know how it feels from reading about others’ encounters with the insects.

As Dr. Satpute explained, “Most of it [is] static images and stories, and they use the terms ‘murder,’ or ‘attacking,’ or ‘killing.’ It’s a really interesting question to see how we can create fears that are things that we’ve never experienced first-hand, and we haven’t necessarily observed even second-hand a direct experience of that, but are required in essence to imagine on the basis of language.”

What McFall witnessed in December 2019, though, was a truly horrific sight and an indication of where the insect’s “murder” nickname comes from. The beekeeper recalled the scene to The New York Times. He said, “It was a typical morning. I made something to eat. I got all my stuff together, and I was just planning to go do a typical hiving inspection.”

McFall’s day, then, started off pretty routinely. He continued, “So I went and I got my smoker and my bee equipment, my bee suit. And then I put everything in my pickup truck and I went to the bee yard.” But very quickly the beekeeper noticed that something was amiss and things took a dark turn.

What McFall saw when he arrived at the bee yard would send chills up the spine of the most hardy of horror-movie fanatics. It was the scene he described as “carnage” and unlike anything he’d ever seen before. Before even stepping out of his truck he realized why “murder hornets” are so named. ​So what was this gruesome scenario?

McFall identified what he earlier described as “a dark shadow” by his hives. He told The New York Times, “As I drove closer, I noticed that those were bee bodies. There were thousands of bee bodies strewn all over the ground in front of the beehive. And as I looked at the ground where all the dead bees were, I noticed that they were all decapitated.”

That’s right: every bee’s head had been ripped clean off its body. But that wasn’t all. McFall continued, “I open[ed] up the beehive, and I looked inside, and it was just more carnage inside the beehive. There were just bees chopped up left and right. There were bee heads everywhere.” The beekeeper, though, had no idea what could have caused the devastation.

According to the beekeeper, when bees experience a hostile attack it’s incredibly rare that they just succumb to it. That is, they’ll typically fight back and take out at least some of their enemies in the process. But in this instance, McFall could see no trace of the predator that had caused such a huge number of fatalities in his hives.

McFall took some photos of the massacre and showed his father, who was also once a beekeeper. But his dad didn’t have a clue what could have caused the decimation either. Baffled as to what happened, McFall collected up the dismembered bees and discarded them in the nearby woods. But, unsurprisingly, the incident weighed on his mind.

Weeks later, the giant hornets’ nest was spotted by the man on his porch just a few miles away. While McFall was dubious that its residents had been the cause of his attack, experts were less skeptical. The two incidents were enough to provoke scientists into an active search for the insect in the area. Why? Well, these hornets can have a devastating effect on the native ecosystem if they are not wiped out.

You see, Asian giant hornets earned their “murder” nickname due to their appetite for bees. As Baker explained to The New York Times, “They’re known as an insect that can spot a colony of honeybees, mark it with a pheromone – a kind of odor that can draw them back there. Then that forager will go back to its nest, get a backup crew to go and target the hive. And then the attack begins.”

Sounds gruesome, right? Well, that’s nothing compared to the attack itself. As Baker described, “So it’s a pretty brutal scene. These hornets are so big, and they’ve got mandibles.” Mandibles, by the way, are lower jawbones which, let’s face it, is pretty freaky for a wasp. And, as Baker further related, “Essentially their jaws on the front of them are enormous compared to the bees.” Yikes!

Perhaps mercifully for their prey, though, the hornet’s assault is over pretty quickly. Baker said, “The attack can be pretty swift. They can kill thousands of [honeybees] in just a few hours. Each one of the hornets can kill a bee every 14 seconds because one of their main ways to make this happen is just to decapitate the bees. That’s their goal.” But, you may be wondering, why?

”What they’re really after here is the part of the bee known as the thorax, essentially the bee’s chest,” Baker told the newspaper. “[They] take that component back to their nest and use it to feed their young. I mean, that’s really a signature of one of their attacks... you look inside one of these hives, and all the bees are dead. Their bodies are split apart, [but] the honey has been left behind.”

The wasps, then, must be wiped out. Any initial search for more hornets, though, was hampered by the season. That’s because, over the winter months, the insect’s natural lifecycle comes to an end. Meanwhile, as the worker members of the species die off, the queens head into hibernation, making colonies smaller and harder for exterminators to locate. Any searches for the pests at this time of year would have been futile.

Instead, hornet-hunting resumed in spring. As Baker explained, “This is the time that the queens... start emerging from hibernation. [They] start flying around looking for a new patch of dirt to start creating a nest, building a new colony, developing a whole new network.” And by extension, of course, attacking honeybees.

As the Department of Agriculture for Washington State explained in a statement, “The most likely time to catch Asian giant hornets is from July through October – when colonies are established and workers are out foraging.” But, rather than try to kill the hornets, anyone who spots one should report sightings on an app launched by the agency. The wasps should not be approached by anyone, including well-equipped beekeepers.

That was something one Vancouver-based hornet-hunter learned the hard way. After donning a bee suit over thick sweatsuit pants and shorts, and even donning Kevlar protectors, he felt ready to face his enemy. But his approach to a nest stirred the hornets, whose angry sting pierced through his layers of protection and into his flesh. Baker relayed the sensation as “like red-hot thumbtacks... being driven into his flesh.”

What’s more, Baker told The New York Times, “He wakes up the next day, and his legs are aching like he has the flu. He’s been a beekeeper and done that kind of work for many years. He’s been stung thousands of times, and he says these stings were the most painful he’s ever experienced.” Yowzer. But, it should be stressed, the biggest threat the Asian giant hornet poses is to bees.

Honeybees are, of course, an essential part of our ecosystem. They pollinate a large proportion of the food that’s served on our dinner plates. And if not the fruit, vegetables and nuts that we eat, then they’ll also pollinate the plants that feed livestock. And with bee numbers already falling off a cliff, the hornets’ presence in the U.S. could yet prove devastating.

You see, Asian bees have developed a defence mechanism against these hornets. They’ll gang up on any invading wasp and, as Baker described, “They flex their muscles, essentially like they’re flying, and produce a constant heat that... turns their little ball into a tiny oven.” The heat gradually increases and up to 30 minutes later their predator is toast – literally “cooked to death,” as Baker put it.

Bees in Western countries, though, have not developed an effective defense against the predator. What’s more, it would take a long time for them to evolve a resistance to the hornet. So the best course of action is to eradicate the invasive species before the massacres continue. Luckily, the beast is very distinctive, should you come face-to-face with it.

As Baker detailed, “It’s got tiger stripes down the back, and its face is large enough to peer at in person. It’s got... [these] Spider-Man teardrop eyes and a really sort of ferocious look… it’s a really striking sight to see them.” So if you see one, report it to the Department of Agriculture. And, in the meantime, don’t have nightmares.