Asian giant hornet nest captured in Washington state

You catch flies with honey, and murder hornets with wine and orange juice…  An Asian giant hornet nest was captured for the first time in the U.S.

Transcript

00:00Oh, yeah, pull it back. She's moving. Can you wiggle it?

00:30A small group of hornets, like maybe a half a dozen, a dozen hornets, can wipe out a hive

00:47in an hour and a half to two hours. So they become really effective at killing the bees.

01:02What will happen is a hornet will mark a hive, and then her sister workers will come,

01:07and then as a group they will just catch bees, bite their heads off, throw them onto the ground,

01:11and they'll do that until the bees are no longer able to mount any kind of defense.

01:15Once that happens, they enter what's called the occupation phase, and they

01:19walk around in the hive at will and take larvae and pupae of the bees,

01:23fly it back to their own nest, and feed it to their young. It's kind of gruesome sounding.

01:45They've been intercepted at ports before. We actually got a couple off of a helicopter

02:08at Fort Lewis in a military base here in Washington that had come back from overseas.

02:14Those were dead. So we do intercept them at ports occasionally, but yeah, these,

02:19to my knowledge, are the first ones that have ever been hanging out in somebody's yard.

02:35So if you get stung by one, it hurts a lot. Conrad, in fact, the beekeeper that destroyed

02:43the nest in Nanaimo described it as having red-hot thumbtacks shoved into his skin.

02:48If you get stung, there's always the risk of anaphylactic shock. A subset of people are

02:53truly allergic to wasp stings or hornet stings, and so a single sting for somebody like that

02:58could be very life-threatening because of their allergic response. Otherwise, it seems like the

03:03most risky human hornet encounters are when somebody stumbles upon a nest or when they're

03:11protecting a, or around a beehive that the hornets have decided to attack.

03:15When they do that, they will defend it the same as they would their own nest,

03:18and that's where you're at risk just from getting multiple stings from very large

03:22venomous insects. The venom has necrotic characteristics. It can make your tissue

03:27dissolve a little bit. It can cause heart and kidney problems.

03:36Don't call it a murder hornet. Remember that they're just Asian giant hornets. They're out

03:40doing their thing. They don't really care about human beings. It's only in the very

03:45unlucky instance that you encountered one that they might sting you.

03:48If you think you've seen one, call your state department of agriculture,

03:53ideally with a photograph, because that will be really helpful for us. Even if it's a negative,

03:59even if you're not sure, that's okay, because the first time we find a positive,

04:02we can really ramp up our activity at that location and have a better chance of eradicating them.

04:10you