At this point we're super early in the spread, and as far as what I read they think this may be the only one in the US.
Worth noting that one nest can create hundreds of new queens that will hibernate the winter and establish a nest in the spring. Not all will survive, but with minimal competition, and significant feeding opportunities from a mostly untapped ecosystem, many will. Destroying one nest to stop exponential growth is a great investment, especially early on.
Note: I'm not an expert in this area, I'm mostly parroting stuff I read in other articles.
This seems like an either-or thing. Either you fully eradicate the species from the area, or they establish a foothold that is infeasible to remove nest-by-nest, and then they grow exponentially.
I think they might be able to.. The asian longhorn beetle seems to be in check in the US (though another pest, the emerald ash borer they've given up on controlling).
But those are species that don't have centralized nests.. This might be easier if you can trap them and trace them back to their homes..
There are a lot of large insects that bear a superficial resemblance to V. mandarinia, especially in the absence of familiarity with hymenopterans. From WSDA's map of citizen sightings, it looks like the most commonly mistaken animals are large sawflies, which are very distant relatives of wasps and hornets and actually serve a significant ecological role by parasitizing the larvae of various tree-boring beetles.
> So they really think the infestation is small enough that it's feasible to find and destroy all the nests by hand?
No, they probably think that it is likely that, if that is not the case, it is likely to still be small enough that the progress can be significantly slowed by that means until a more complete solution is found.
Given that magnitude matters a lot and that it's a major threat to bee populations and through them much of the agriculture of the country, stalling tactics are a lot better than nothing.
I've never had to deal with a murder hornet infestation, but I can approve of their 'vacuum' method for clearing yellowjacket nests in high-traffic areas.
Partially fill a shop vac with soapy water, stick the nozzle as close to the nest entrance as possible, then turn on the vacuum and hear the wasps get sucked into the machine as they try to enter or exit the nest. It takes a few hours, and potentially a couple of separate sessions to mop up any stragglers.
No fancy beekeeper suit necessary, and, best of all, no need to spread nasty poisons.
The method is fine but I'd probably still wear a suit while setting such a thing up ... at least a jacket, gloves, full pants tucked into thick socks, and mosquito net.
Most insects are very prone to dying of dehydration if their exoskeleton is pierced - it's how diatomaceous earth works. My best guess with how vacuums kill insects is small nicks to the exoskeleton from flying debris causing eventual death. I've never vacuumed up an insect or spider and seen it come out alive.
I have a mid-grade phobia of stinging insects and arachnids.
I once blew a few hours to anxiously watching youtube videos of people destroying nasty wasp/hornet infestations. (I'm still not sure why. Probably some mix of morbid fascination and aggression fantasy.)
The soapy-water-shopvac trick appeared in a lot of those videos. (Less commonly: thermite, or quad-propeller drones.)
Same w/ "bees," but not arachnids. Also blew a few hours watching nest extermination videos. I generally wish the best (within reason) for our non-human beings, but it was very cathartic.
For those wondering about the soapy water, it effectively suffocates the hornets because soap allows the water to penetrate and clog the spiracles which prevents them from breathing.
Soapy water is actually a powerful insecticide against many arthropods:
It does seem to work on insects resilient to other poisons for sure.
We used a mix of vinegar, soap, and water in a spray bottle to rid our patio of earwigs this year and it seemed to work incredibly well. The insecticides we were spraying them with before trying the soap did absolutely nothing but cost $7 a can.
Does that perhaps depend on the species of wasp, or maybe the reach of the wand?
IIRC, there was one youtube video where the little bastards went straight for the dude's face during shop-vac'ing. He could smell the venom they were trying to spray in his eyes.
When one of the wasps (or hornets?) went straight for his GoPro sensor, its face filled my large monitor and I nearly had a heart attack.
I read that they can’t see well in the dark, so I deal with them at night. It’s a bit unnerving hearing them fly around when you can’t see them, but I’ve never been stung :)
I'm no expert, but I've read a bit about Vespula vulgaris (the most common sort of wasp in the UK) and tackled a few nests in the past.
My impression is that if you put a vacuum cleaner next to the entrance you may, if you're lucky, catch nearly all the wasps that leave the nest, but the queen never leaves the nest, and the eggs and larvae don't leave the nest, and I think there may also be some workers that stay in the nest looking after the larvae, so things will be quieter after you've finished vacuuming, but the colony will probably regenerate itself in a week or so.
Might be tricky if the nest is in a garage or something (and not easy to cut down and move), but otherwise that could probably be solved by burning it.
Vespex is used here in New Zealand and has been a game changer. Wasps are the greatest pest in New Zealand if you measure pests in “kgs per hectare”.
With Vespex you don’t go looking for nests, you let the colony poison itself.
Because it is protein based and not sugar based, it’s not attractive to as many species. The downside is that the wasps only take it at a specific time of year - when they are consuming protein.
Professionals wear PPE because if you incur a low-probability risk every time you do X, and you do X often enough (because it's your profession), X will happen to you.
For example, if you have a 99% chance of nothing going wrong, and you do that thing 500 times, it's essentially guaranteed to happen (0.99^500 = 0.0066).
The stinging insect removal guys will be stung if they are in the profession for decades without PPE.
> trapping and using dental floss to tie tracking devices to the hornets
What? That seems crazy (and cool) to be able to create a tracking device light enough for a hornet to fly and still have enough battery to transmit even a periodic chirp.
That'd probably be a good solution if the transmitter didn't need weatherproofing. I suppose adhesive film could be placed over the gap after removing the tab, though.
I doubt they use a socket that would allow the battery to be isolated, it's probably directly soldered in for weight and reliability. Otherwise they could just ship the battery uninstalled and let the user plug it in when he gets it. A weight of 0.15g doesn't give a lot of room for extra components like a battery socket.
Perhaps they could put a tiny antifuse in circuit with the battery inside the IC package. Supply external "programming" current to the IC, and it would melt the antifuse and get the battery going.
I would think that the engineers developing then already did the cost benefit analysis and decided that shipping them activated (and tested) is the best option for their users
The whole device is encapsulated for waterproofing so supplying any current at all to it is tricky.
It says it's light activated. So likely they've put a tiny light sensor in it that the microcontroller polls occasionally during the lowest power mode. That might be a tiny solar panel too. But using that to electrically drive an electronic power switch is tricky if you don't have the budget for a custom ASIC; if you don't have that budget, you'll add a decent amount of weight in a device that tiny.
Honestly, I'm not at all surprised that they've chosen to accept a short shelf life instead. It's pretty remarkable that they can squeeze that much functionality into a 11mm long by 3.5mm diameter cylinder.
Or just bring one of the battery leads out of the encapsulation and cut it. Just a tiny bit of solder and you hook it back up. With the rest of the device waterproofed just one tiny exposed contact should still remain waterproof with thin gauge solid conductor wire. There's no voltage differential so it shouldn't rust moreso than just a regular blob of solder exposed to the elements.
A strip of plastic means you have to have a spring at that end of the battery, a hole in the device for the plastic strip, and enough structure around the battery to hold the spring and battery separately. The hole also makes waterproofing more difficult.
All of this would add weight and size, and those trackers are really small and really lightweight. Judging by the photos, the battery is just hard wired to the circuit, and the whole thing is encapsulated with a thin layer of epoxy for waterproofing. That's by far the cheapest, easiest, and most reliable way to build something as lightweight as possible.
I wonder why its not just two interconnecting cylinders (using a tiny gasket) that you push together with thumb/finger when you want to activate/power the device.
Given that there would have been some serious engineering to think through the design there must have been trade-offs that I'm not considering though.
According to the link above they say they use lithium batteries, probably better power/weight, but likely the whole device is potted in epoxy and there isn't any way to turn it on/off. It just runs from when the battery is welded/soldered until there isn't power left.
Those protective suits look like something from a science fiction work. It even looks like a cell shaded rendering at second glance. I guess these hornets earned their title.
It makes me a little nauseous to think about all the resources going to tracking down these insects, but this is truly an area where an ounce of prevention is worth many pounds of cure.
The scope of North America's invasive species problem is enormous. For many folks in urban areas, it's possible that you might go your whole day only encountering one native bird species (American Crow), but a whole host of invasive species (Rock Pigeon, House Sparrows, European Starlings).
‘All the resources’ make you nauseous? Seems like a weird reaction.
Washington State department of agriculture’s budget is public information; they spend about a quarter of a billion dollars a year on all their programs. I can’t imagine this particular operation is making much of a dent in that overall spend. According to the captions of those photographs, they have entomologists and pest control specialists on staff already. Salaries are also public. Sven Spichinger, shown in one of those pictures, Managing Entomologist, is on $87,000 a year - whether he’s hunting for murder hornets or not, presumably. There are three different levels of ‘Pest Biologist’ job in the department. It kind of looks like this is a project that is taking up the time of a few people who they already had on staff, to deal with exactly this kind of problem.
Does all government spending make you nauseous, or only when it’s visibly helping?
If you're cooking anything with meat or imported produce, you're still damaging the environment, regardless of where it's cooked. Also your leftovers need to be put into something(often plastic) and stored in a refrigerated or frozen environment(electric/carbon costs), then reheated(electric/carbon cost). If you get tired of eating the same thing after 3 days and the rest rots away in your fridge, you've just created a ton of waste, or if you think to yourself you're going to spend 3 hours doing weekly meal-prep, but then flake out and don't do it, you just wasted everything. Some people are just terrible chefs or do not have the energy for it after working 50 - 60 hours in the week.
Also you could make a case that large houses with nice kitchens also have environmental costs to build and maintain, and living in small apartments with communal kitchens or restaurants nearby is better.
You make some thought provoking points, but there are a lot of "ifs" there. So, even a chance that some savings might be achieved by cooking staple foods at home once in a while seems worth considering.
Most people end up leaving a lot on the table when eating out, and 100% of that food ends up in the trash / wasted.
If you want to save money then cooking bulk foods at home might make sense, people just need to make sure they're really calculating the costs properly. If you want a balanced diet and varied menu, then it can be expensive and labor intensive.
If you want to save the environment, then you should reconsider your whole diet. Reduce meat intake and make smaller meals with more environmentally conscious ingredients(likely more expensive).
Regarding leftovers, plenty of people put restaurant leftovers in a container and take them home to eat later. The people who don't would likely waste food at home too.
Every effort we make today involves producing lots of plastic, burning diesel, and other ways which wreck both human and animal habitats.
This effort to destroy one hornet's nest probably had direct result of bringing someone a little closer towards having asthma and indirectly, through supply chain effects, costing a few dozen insect colonies, animals, and plants their lives somewhere else in the world.
Now that you mention it, it does make me a bit nauseated.
People are living, shitting, and dying en masse on the streets of LA who need food and basic sanitation but you really can't even imagine a non malicious interpretation of someone saying paying for teams of bubble suited wasp chasers seems like potentially a misallocation of resources?
Or do you just generally like to bully anyone who challenges any form of government spending by attacking strawmen?
Not GP, but this seems like being upset by the environmental damage resulting from your city fire department driving diesel firetrucks in relative and absolute scale and scope.
I'm actually somewhat upset about this in my city. The fire department is driving these gigantic fire engines with ladders and everything to every medical emergency, when just a small van would be totally fine.
Chesterton’s Fence: I grew up close to the Chief of our town’s Fire Dept. He explained that they sent the second piece of large equipment primarily because of the re-dispatch problem.
If they get a second call which would require the engine, they didn’t want to risk having the fire personnel on scene in the little rescue truck and away from the engine, delaying response to the fire. (For the same reason, they wore the full turnout gear to support medical calls.)
They could leave one guy in the station to drive the engine to the fire and drive the rest of the crew in the small van to the fire, where they then man the engine.
There is probably more to it, but at least the way you describe it doesn't sound convincing.
Also I should add the in the previous cities I lived in they of course didn't do that. They just used small vans for medical emergencies. Originally when I moved here i thought it was burning a lot more when I saw all those engines on the street all the time, but it wasn't that.
My suspicion is that it's related to justifying having so much of the big equipment.
But if the big engines are overused too much they likely break down much faster too, driving a vicious circle of needing more and more of them, creating bigger budgets, more power for the fire chief etc.etc.
What equipment with what personnel is dispatched is incredibly complicated. You would be shocked. And most fire districts/departments regularly tweak their "response plans."
I am all ears for how we could solve homelessness in LA by defunding the Washington State Department of Agriculture’s entomology program.
Maybe you’re right, though - the progressive militarization of state pest control departments during the global war on terror is probably one of the principal ways in which inequality is perpetuated in this country.
You... You do realize they're trying to rid these wasps because they're an existential threat to our bee population, right? You realize that losing our bees would cost farmers billions of collective dollars and raise the price of food for everyone, right?
Personal attacks are not allowed on HN, regardless of how bad another comment is or you feel it is. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.
> People are living, shitting, and dying en masse on the streets of LA who need food and basic sanitation but you really can't even imagine a non malicious interpretation of someone saying paying for teams of bubble suited wasp chasers seems like potentially a misallocation of resources?
Are you suggesting the government of the State of Washington is responsible for providing food and basic sanitation in Los Angeles?
>> I can’t imagine this particular operation is making much of a dent in that overall spend.
When I read the article I thought there are likely other nests nearby. Perhaps they should use some of the forestry budget to do a controlled burn in the area. It'll reduce severity of future fires and get any of any hornets nearby ;-)
It's thought that these came south from Canada. That's a fairly significant distance. They can fly miles in a single day [0] and specimens in Washington have been found 50 miles apart.
If there's evidence of multiple other hives in the area, a controlled burn may get some of them, but the scope of the fire necessary could also be massive.
I'm not saying the option shouldn't be part of our arsenal. And if this is an area prone to wild-fires, then as you said it could assist there as well. However, I'm not sure it's a good option at this time, especially considering the side effects on other local indigenous species.
Please omit personal swipes from your HN posts. You sparked a flamewar with that last bit, and your comment would have been just fine without it. The first bit too. The middle of the sandwich was good.
The department may very well need more significant resources to continue this fight, as will surrounding states if Washington isn't effective in fighting this.
I'm not against government spending. I think there are plenty of problems that market forces alone cannot solve. I think the government should provide a solid safety net for its citizens. That is precisely why I lament the resources required for this. They are absolutely necessary, and at the same time it means there are fewer resources to go to other absolutely necessary needs.
I don't see what there is to lament. If this is necessary spending (it seems it is) and there is other necessary spending, then it seems we must pay for both of those things.
I guess we could wish that the hornets never arrived here, but the life of a government is solving thousands of problems like these. If not the hornets, it would be something else. The uplifting moment is that this was a successful containment. Money well-spent :)
Yes, we should do both things, and the hornet issue is essential spending. But resources are limited, and there are plenty of people don't consider safety-net spending essential. That's my lament, that between hornets and people, few will dispute the necessity of dealing with the first, while plenty will the second.
There's a big difference though: It's well known that the rat population in Reykjavik are transitory tourists, often visiting purely for the spectacular volcano tours in the area.
Antarctica is clearly doing something right, I'd suggest we emulate them. A a well-funded coalition of wildlife experts should be deployed to determine what special conditions have conspired to produce such a resistant ecological niche.
Hemelin, Germany on the other hand only found a temporary solution to the problem when the anonymous Pied Piper visited the area. Perhaps he was unaware that some rats can swim up to a mile and simply drove the local rat population to the surrounding area. Regardless, the example clearly illustrates that music-based solutions to the problem are, at best, temporary.
Is there any evidence of such attempts to neuter Mother Nature actually working? Unless, global trade ceases, can this effort be maintained and successful over the long haul?
I'm not suggesting it's bad or wrong to try, only whether there's evidence that the odds favor doing so.
There are some success stories, like the European Grapevine Moth in CA [1]. The key seems to be aggressive action when the threat is still in it’s infancy and contained. Given that murder hornets weren’t reported in the US until this year, I’m hopeful. For something like the invasive ice plant already covering the West Coast there seems little hope.
Agreed! I’ve read about certain coastal areas that have been purged of invasive species. But there’s a constant upkeep cost to keep the invaders from just moving in again a couple years later.
For these murder hornets, if we make a big up front investment in eradicating them now, there’s hope that we can prevent them from establishing themselves and becoming another perpetual battle.
1994: We'll need airtight space suits for an Ebola outbreak.
2020: Surgical masks are a bit much to expect people to wear during a pandemic, Ebola has been circulating in Congo since 2014, and we'll need airtight space suits for a murder hornet outbreak.
Had we all been wearing surgical masks in public since the 90s, probably well over a million lives would have been saved by now from flu deaths alone.
Basically, since the 90s we've put a much much higher value on human life. I expect mask usage to extend far beyond covid and handshaking to cease being a cultural greeting.
COVID-19 has become more infectious over the course of the pandemic, with a strain that results in higher viral loads becoming predominant: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32697968/
As surgical masks are much less than 100% effective even in ideal conditions, let alone actual wear, it wouldn't be surprising if more usage of them would just be an evolutionary pressure for flu to have higher viral output. Quite similar to how widespread use of less than 100% effective anti-bacterial agents just results in bacteria evolving resistance, reducing the usefulness of those agents for the most vulnerable part of the population who need them most.
> It's hard to compare across countries. But mask-wearing Japan and South Korea have higher rates of flu and pneumonia deaths than the US/Canada/Europe
Possibly confounded by disparate population densities.
Belgium, the Netherlands, and Israel are all slightly less dense than South Korea, and more dense than Japan. Yet all three have significantly lower flu/pneumonia death rates than either South Korea or Japan.
Bangladesh also has a slightly lower flu/pneumonia death rate than Japan, even though it has 3x the density (though Bangladesh has a somewhat lower life expectancy (72) than Japan (84); Belgium, Netherlands, and Israel are all fairly close (80+) to Japan).
Who needs to take the risk of physical human contact or to see the smile of a stranger walking down the street when you can survive a few years longer depressed inside a sterile bubble.
It's an example of positive daily human interaction. Keeping minimum distance and hiding the most expressive part of the body removes a lot of that from daily life, and people do suffer from it.
The world is significantly colder this year. I can't be the only one that feels it.
> It's an example of positive daily human interaction.
I find adults smiling to be gaudy and disconcerting, ever since I was a child. My wife included, although I like most of her so it's ok. Children don't bother me though, as it seems sincere.
Interestingly, that video suggests that some beekeepers actually prefer the aggressive, "africanized", bees as they can be more productive than less aggressive bees in the right situation. But they're a public health hazard, so most beekeepers choose to euthanize more aggressive hives to deliberately breed calmer, safer, bees.
This video also suggests that the high level of aggression wasn't optimal in at least some areas, so it's being evolved out and the bees are becoming less aggressive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psBomn2cPNw
IIUC workers (or at least worker larvae) can become queens under the right conditions, so it's more likely for the undesirable genes to be removed if the entire hive is euthanized.
Also, in the case of that video, IIRC having the still aggressive workers in the locations available to that beekeeper wouldn't be desirable, even if later generations were calmer.
It's not about the queens, it's about the drones (male bees).
The workers only start laying eggs if the hive goes without a queen for several weeks, and either way the eggs they lay are unfertilized and therefore cannot be raised into new queens. So requeening it is certain to work in that regard.
However, unless you euthanize whole hive, the aggressive drones will continue to live for a while and can mate with queens in neighbouring hives and spread the aggressive genes that way. So there is an advantage to euthanizing the whole hive instead of requeening it.
Requeening is ideally done with a queen that is from known good stock, not by emergency requeening.
I’ve just done it at home. It’s cheaper to raise your own, but you will get traits that are undesirable, aggression being one.
The drones in a hive are not all raised there, they move about hives, so killing the hive won’t get them all.
Hives that have got a laying worker are also very hard to requeen and it usually isn’t possible. One way is to shake all the bees out some distance away then hope the laying worker doesn’t make it back to the hive (she can’t fly). However those hives are hard to fix, as they usually reject the new queen.
There is a lot of differences in beekeeping region to region and country to country, so whatever I have seen and done may be very different to other places.
> it's more likely for the undesirable genes to be removed if the entire hive is euthanized.
Yes, removing the genes is needed, but that can be done by killing the old queen, waiting a day then putting in a caged queen of known good genes. There is no need to kill the hive that I am aware of.
Requeening to correct temperament is part of beekeeping and killing the hive seems extreme. It is also wasteful of the equipment and comb because depending on the method used it won’t be able to be salvaged.
Killing hives is generally done by pouring petrol in the top then sealing the hive up, and is seen as one of the more humane methods. However I’ve only known this being done for American Foul Brood, not for temperament.
The improved temperament sometimes happens almost instantly, but is generally over a about a month as the workers die off. The total lifespan of a worker is only about 6 weeks in midsummer.
I keep bees, but in New Zealand an aggressive colony is a lesser beast than an africanised monster. I hope I’m missing something (eg what is africanised bees reject new queens, but I can’t find anything suggesting this is the case).
I wonder why they didn't use an insecticide on the nest. The exterminator I hired used a powder on the entry to our attic and the Yellowjackets carried it into the nest and it wiped out the whole thing brilliantly (and we sealed the hole). A targeted application would require very little product. With a powder, it would also kill any insects that got away, and it could trace/damage other nests if the hornet moved to another colony. It seems to me a vacuum would be less thorough, and I would think they'd want to be very thorough in this instance, maybe even to the point of doing both.
It seems most likely that they wanted to avoid killing the hornets. Perhaps to study them and find out which native Japanese population of hornets they came from in order to stem the flow of this invasive species. Could even be simply to preserve life.
The hornets had been put on ice which lowers their metabolism to a state of stupor but they recover from this as soon as their temperature goes back up. Another common technique for making stinging insects docile during handling is using smoke to calm a beehive's alertness response through inhibiting their ability to detect pheromones that signal danger.
Universal rhyme would dictate that machine intelligence is learning our behavior and one day apply it to us when it is in charge.
All children eventually become stronger than their parents, and most parents reap what they sow, and are treated a combination of how they treated their parents and their children.
In this case, our ancestors is all the other DNA-based life on earth, and our children are silicon machines.
Now, think about how we are treating the animals and also the machines (yelling at, cursing out, smashing, being very impatient with, expecting perfection)
Red light is typically used at night in order to avoid destroying the eye's rhodopsin, which helps with night vision and takes at least 30 minutes of non-exposure to blue light to fully replenish. You'll see pilots and astronomers using red flashlights for this reason.
I think hornets probably don't react to red light. I think bee researchers also use red lights in labs when extracting bees so they don't become active in the presence of light.
Murder hornets are a real threat to honey bee hives. A handful of hornets can take out a hive of thousands.
What's interesting is the way that honey bees defend against them. A bunch of bees surround each hornet, then they intensify the flapping of their wings, which then generates enough heat to kill the hornet. In other words, the hornets are cooked alive.
It’s worth noting that the honeybee defense mechanism you describe is unique to Asian honeybees, which evolved this defense specifically because of the native Asian giant hornet / murder hornet.
European honeybees, which are used in most of the world, have no such defense mechanism and would indeed be helplessly slaughtered by these hornets.
I’d definitely advocate watching some YouTube footage about these creatures, they’re fascinating.
Isn‘t that exactly hoe a special very aggressive breed was created? They breed two different ones, both not aggressive but with interesting capabilities and somehow they created an aggressive one?
Yes and no. A biologist (Kerr) was trying to either improve the heat-resistance of european honeybees or gentle the african bees and amplify their productivity.
A fuckup led to the release of several of swarms of african bees which went on to crossbreed with local european honeybees, so africanised honeybees were not actually a human creation.
The result turned out to mostly take from their african ancestry: highly defensive, fast reproduction, readily swarming (or even absconding), way less picky about their nesting sites, … leading to high invasiveness.
AFAIK africanised honeybees are no worse than their african ancestors (though I'm not sure they're any better).
Bees form a mass in winter and work their wing muscles to keep themselves warm, rotating bees between inside and surface so none gets too cold for too long. So they did have a base behavior from which the surround-and-cook behavior could evolve.
When I first heard about the hornet defense I wondered how on Earth the bees could've come up with that. But if they already clumped up for warmth it's a lot more scrutable.
I think that comic understates the amazingness of the adaptation.
The honeybees don’t just swarm the hornets, they will actually retreat into the hive and allow the hornets to enter, then trap them inside while they roast them to death. All of this works because the honeybees can vibrate themselves to a temperature just warmer than the hornets can tolerate, which is also just less than the bees can tolerate. Just one or two degrees celsius of tolerance is the difference.
Hopefully no Asian giant hornets ever evolve a slightly higher temperature tolerance!
I know bees are fundamental but I think we should adjust ourselves along with nature, and not try to always dictate things. We can live without honey, eat fruits instead (for which wasps and hornets participate also in pollination), they even provide better nutrients
You mean hornets? Of course I know, but we can still adapt our consumption mode, honeybees are for what? honey mostly. We can also reduce planes travel, that wouldn't hurt as well
that sounds weird, of course human influence massively things, but you can't just decide on how to restore the "natural" state like this, it may be even worse by trying to do something brutally.
The good honeybees vs the bad hornets or wasps. It's much more complex. There are articles about how wild bees do a better job at pollination https://www.google.com/search?q=wild+bees+vs+honey+bees+poll..., wasps similarly play a huge role, for example with fruit trees (figs is the best example)
Ignoring the threat that these hornets pose to people, standing back and allowing our honeybee population to be wiped out would have incalculable effects across the ecosystem.
They're a major pollinator. Sure, there are others, but why would we risk adding more catastrophe when we've already wiped out such a huge number of insects?
Blaine Washington is right along the Canadian border and next to many islands. The islands are sparsely inhabited and infrequently visited by humans it makes me wonder if maybe there is still a colony out there. It seems like a difficult area to do containment so glad they tracked these down.
It looks like in 2019 Vancouver island (which is huge) had a colony get eradicated, but otherwise haven't seen much else reported.
Invasive species can have huge effects on agriculture and other human activities. Giant murder hornets can be scary even beyond these rational concerns. The presence of a new invasive species can thus be important news as the spread of those species can effect human activities.
I’m a beekeeper and every passing year it becomes harder to keep my colonies alive. I’m really glad that we’re taking this threat seriously, because we don’t need one more problem on our list of things that kill our bees.
While I’m at it, please allow me to remind everyone that there are thousands of solitary bee species in the world. They are the ones that go extinct or in real danger compared to our honey bees. There are many struggling beekeepers like me in the world, and we’re doing our best to keep our bees alive. But thousands of species are without keepers and they are dying. Please be gentle to the nature. Let them live.
This is an example of typical modern thinking that believes we can solve problems such as global warming and bee extinction by doing individual actions. This is completely nonsense. Either we do this as a public policy or there is no solution.
Your comment is an example of typical programmer thinking that says "only a perfect solution is worth releasing".
I have been guilty of that error countless times.
An individual's actions will not solve a society's woes, but they don't need to. If they help a little bit where they are, they can be worth doing.
Furthermore, individuals trying to help does not preclude larger-scale solutions. The people attempting individual actions could even contribute to the larger-scale or policy-based solutions.
I am not advocating for a "perfect solution or nothing". I advocate for solutions based on public policy, even if they're partial. But I object to individual solutions, because they're no solution at all. It doesn't matter how many people do little actions, if there are a few big actors (say multinational corporations) exploiting and polluting the environment, the result is worse than zero! It is just like taking as aspirin to "help cure" a cancer that is destroying the body. And in fact focusing on doing these little things is a net negative, because it distracts from the big actions that need to be taken to fix an urgent problem.
This worldview discounts the political awareness that such actions can foster. Someone who replaced their crabgrass lawn with native meadow has a daily embodiment of their value system. When such a person hears about murder hornets, is this person somehow less likely to contact his/her representatives about the issue than the person who kept a typical lawn, in your assessment ? That's the only way I can see this as a net negative, rather than neutral or trivially positive.
Or, given that the described standpoint suggests I have enough attention for either planting a meadow lawn or supporting 'big action', why are you wasting it telling us about this, instead of naming names of the big actors to write to our representatives about and avoid electing representatives that hold a favorable position toward them ?
1) Individual good actions virtually never outweigh large-scale bad actions, but the world is actually worse off if individuals do not take those little positive actions. Little polluter + big polluter yields more pollution than big polluter.
2) Taking the small positive actions is actually a lot of what helps people work on the huge, difficult problems. Humans are more effective when our psychology is a unified self rather than in conflict with itself, and taking small, positive concrete steps helps us keep ourselves in alignment with our big-picture goals and ideals.
I guess both of those fit into the abstract observation that you're bifurcating - people don't have to choose between individual concrete actions and contributing to policy efforts and other high-level approaches.
By all means, if you see someone explicitly saying they choose one at the expense of the other, say something.
When they don't say that, though, don't assume that's what they're doing.
I've read a number of articles describing the stressors on bee colonies, but I'm interested in your take - what do you see as the primary factors affecting your colonies?
I live in place where winters are harsh. Colonies need to be well-prepared to successfully overwinter. They are amazingly robust when they are healthy, but anything that affects this preparation can easily be deadly over a period of time.
There can be many reasons. The Varroa Mite [0] is one that we have to constantly fight against, these days. The mites don't kill the entire colony, but weakens it so much that the colony can't overwinter. Or there viruses [1] that deform the bees' wings that can debilitate the colony. There are also other problems that we don't see where I live, but other beekeepers have to fight, such as the Small Hive Beetle [2].
I suspect because of the ongoing wildfires and poor air quality in this region, one of my queens stopped laying eggs mid-summer, at a time when she normally lays 1,500-2,000 eggs every day. I had to replace her. I don't know if that colony is going to survive the winter.
Some other colonies had similar problems. Yesterday a beekeeper friend told me she lost a colony and she has another one on the brink of collapsing.
Then, we also don't know who is using what type of pesticides around here. Bees can forage anywhere in the 2-3 mile radius. It's near impossible for me to know what's going on in such a wide area.
Are things like the beetles and virus new introductions to the area, or is it just a confluence of factors that are hitting harder now?
I'd also heard (many years ago) that, while the colonies can collapse, the bees normally reproduce quickly enough that you don't see much of a net loss in colony counts year-over-year - how do you see that?
My impression is that the bee populations have been remarkably resilient year over year, but whenever I see this kind of stress-and-recovery cycle, I worry that there's a tipping point - many systems seem Fine under stress until they overwhelm their recovery mechanism and collapse catastrophically.
Not the OP, but here in New Zealand the issues are greatly exacerbated by hive overstocking, migrant beekeepers (eg a truck brings in 100 hives one day, and the additional extras in those hives are spread to local hives), poor beekeeping, American Foul Brood and a low sale price for honey.
Have you heard that certain pseudoscorpions might be of help against varroa mites? They seem to hunt them and would need to live in the beekeeping box as I understand.
There is a tiny bit of information on them in german Wikipedia [0] (automatic translation [1], let me know if I can help with translation). Wikipedia says that they can be found worldwide, so maybe they will be of help.
(Please note that under _no circumstances_ this was meant as encouragement to introduce new invasive species to your area!)
Here is more information: the page of the beekeeper researching pseudoscorpions and bee interactions is at [2], [3] is about a book he wrote, called "Instruction manual for species-appropriate husbandry of bees and pseudoscorpions". A comment in [3] also suggests that under ideal circumstances, these pseudoscorpions might be able to deal with a small hive beetle.
This poster [4] states that having pseudoscorpions in hives unfortunately had no influence on varroa numbers, though.
New Zealander here - a lot of people are using Oxalic acid and glycerine on paper strips and are getting great results here - me included.
The paper is a plasterboard jointing paper and 3-5 layers are sewn together and soaked in a solution of about 40% Oxalic acid, 60% glycerine. Used like conventional mite strips they need replacing more often but seem to work really well.
Randy Oliver has been trialing other delivery methods in California.
My hives are the best they have ever been this season, with a very strong start.
I don't know much about bees but I just recently started following an Instagram account (@texasbeeworks) that earlier this year posted a video[1] of a bee with a Varroa Mite.
The video's caption:
"Alright, here is what I want everyone to know about ‘murder hornets’. Only one nest of Asian Giant Hornets has been found in North America and it was quickly eradicated. Right now, the nation’s top entomologists are watching the situation and beekeepers like myself are not worried. If these hornets become a serious problem for honeybees, we will find a solution to keep bees safe.
If you really want something to be afraid of and if you want to know what keeps beekeepers awake at night, look closely at the bee in this video. You’ll see a dark, round speck on the side of her body. That, my friends, is something far more terrifying than these so-called ‘murder hornets’—it is a Varroa Mite. (Scroll through to see it up close.) The Varroa Mite is a parasitic mite that feeds on the fat bodies of bees and its decimating bee populations around the world.
At this point in time, Varroa Mites are a much greater threat to honeybee populations than Asian Giant Hornets and if they got the same attention in the press, maybe we would have a solution for them. Everyone now knows the term ‘murder hornet’ but the thing we should be talking about In the US is the Varroa Mite, a creature whose scientific name is literally ‘Varroa Destructor’.
Please stop the murder hornet hype and please start talking about the thing that’s killing more honeybees in the US than anything else right now—varroa mites."
Varroa is and has been my #1 problem for a while. I hate it. But I can't agree with this statement:
"If these hornets become a serious problem for honeybees, we will find a solution to keep bees safe."
It can easy be too late. Look at what's happening in Europe. They simply can't stop the hornets.
Of course it's more dramatic to show these huge insects. They are impressive and scary. Mites are small and look insignificant. They are not dramatic. They won't generate hype. I understand the frustration as a beekeeper, but don't let yet another problem become too big to reverse the tide on. It is obviously cheaper to deal with the hornets right now, hype or no hype.
Just like the US could have treated Coronavirus seriously early on and helped keep numbers down, but chose to do nothing and now it's everywhere and doing far more damage to the economy.
Don't let murder hornets become the bee's new Coronavirus equivalent. It sounds like they're already dealing with plenty of pandemic-like issues as it is.
To quote George W Bush, who actually took pandemics seriously, "A pandemic is a lot like a forest fire. If caught early it might be extinguished with limited damage. If allowed to smolder, undetected, it can grow to an inferno that can spread quickly beyond our ability to control it."
There’s been many weeks where epidemiologist were sounding the alarms but the CDC had basically zero tests available. The whole world was getting infected and the US was flying blind
Or May be just look at what other Asian countries have done (outside of China) and look at what they did. It’s exactly everything the US did not do
We can't find a way to stop them + huge insects = unsolved problem
This seems contradictory to me as a beek. 5/16 holes as a mouse guard should also keep huge insects out of the hive. It also should be easy to create pheromone traps if it is true that the hornet's seek out the scent of other dead hornets.
On a side note, I see mites as a genetics issue. I would rather see commercial outfits using selection rather than treating with chemicals and shipping packages with weak genetics all over the US. Spearding weak genes is kind of the opposite of Darwin...
Yeah, I don't use pollen traps, propolis traps, nor queen excludes. I'm not sure how they would effect drones. I know drones can fit through 3/8 inch. I'm not sure what size the hornets can fit through. If they are the same size as cicada killers, I would guess 3/8 is too small for them.
Drones can’t fit through my excluders.
Every so often I put a frame
from the brood boxes above the excluder. Old frames or ones with lots of drone cells. I have to check back in a few days to let the drones out or they die and block the excluder. Workers try to pull them though and jam them in the holes.
I’m currently using some nice American made excluders and they are really nice. They are made of wire and are quite quite rigid.
> Only one nest of Asian Giant Hornets has been found in North America and it was quickly eradicated. Right now, the nation’s top entomologists are watching the situation and beekeepers like myself are not worried.
I can't help but think of when we only had one covid case and people said not to worry.
Not a beekeeper but it’s pretty easy to connect the dots from bee extinction to ecological collapse. No pollinators leads to decreased germination which leads to less food for the lower levels of the food chain and on and on
> Not a beekeeper but it’s pretty easy to connect the dots from bee extinction to ecological collapse.
How is that an easy connection? Your argument essentially says without bees then nature as we know it falls apart catastrophically - I am incredulous you could interpret this as obvious. Species go extinct all the time and yet Earth is still doing just fine, apart from the damage humans are doing to it.
> No pollinators
Bees are not the only pollinators
> leads to decreased germination
A decrease is not the same as elimination
> which leads to less food
A decrease is not the same as elimination
> for the lower levels of the food chain and on and on
Your argument is a about knock-on effects, which certainly exist. But you seem to think if any point in the chain breaks, it leads to ecological collapse. Why do you assume nature is so fragile? I am not a biologist and maybe bees are special or there is something I do not understand, but I certainly don't think it's an obvious conclusion.
You're making a leap from "collapse" to "elimination". Searching for "GDP collapse", the first result I get is referring to a global 4.3% predicted collapse for 2020. People seem to be taking that pretty hard.
Nature might endure what we throw at it, we might not. When people say that humans are ruining the planet, maybe a few people are actually worried about the rock, but most of us are worried about having an ecosystem compatible with our civilization.
You might want to investigate about the sparrows in china, quick version; a campaign to exterminate the sparrows to increase grain production ended up with famines.
Peoples with brushes on trees and bushes...and for everything that doesn't make money and is dependent on bees will go extinct too (flowers, trees etc..). And now back to school.
Is that a real risk? I thought it was pretty straightforward to breed more of them. For now. The colony collapse problem is real, but I haven't heard any serious discussion of honeybees going extinct.
> but I haven't heard any serious discussion of honeybees going extinct.
In Europe it is..in fact it was the main-theme 3 years ago. And not just bees but insects overall...the honeybee was just the friendly looking ambassador for that message.
I'm pretty sure honey bees are relatively safe as long as there are beekeepers. As I noted above, there are thousands of solitary and/or wild bee species that are in real danger. They pollinate an important part of the plants. Their loss would probably trigger chain reactions that we should avoid.
If you have access to gardens, you can plant bee-friendly flowering plants according to your region's climate.
You can learn about the wild bees in your region and understand what natural resources they thrive on. Some of them are so specialized that they can easily be threatened by the loss of habitat. Some of the bee "houses" can become great activities for children. For example kids can build Mason Bee houses and watch them attract bees.
Supporting local beekeepers and bee-friendly farmers.
By trying to keep an immaculate lawn or mosquito-free areas, most of us sacrifice the local insect population including various bees that are affected by those pesticides.
By spreading awareness, but also starting your own hive is a great hobby and it's quite affordable if you have the time. You don't even have to have them in your garden or balcony. You can speak to local farmers, and they can be happy to host your hive on their property. That's how I started.
I have a good amount of bee-friendly flowers that are visited daily in the spring and summer by our local bee populations, it is very much “build it and they will come”.
If I had a bigger yard I would host a couple hives of my own, I love just sitting out in the flowers in the warmer weather and watching them forage.
Bumble bees may be an option? Smaller hives, less issues with neighbours and great to watch.
I have no issues with neighbours and have somewhere between 3 and 6 hives depending on how you count. This is in a backyard of a suburban section. Preemptive honeystrikes may have helped - I get 150-250kgs of honey that it’s no issue giving it away and that seems to generate good will.
Native solitary bees are going extinct and in danger largely because of being outcompeted by invasive European honeybees. They're not the only invasive hymenopteran established in the Nearctic, but thanks to human effort they are by far the most prolific.
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[ 0.80 ms ] story [ 262 ms ] threadWorth noting that one nest can create hundreds of new queens that will hibernate the winter and establish a nest in the spring. Not all will survive, but with minimal competition, and significant feeding opportunities from a mostly untapped ecosystem, many will. Destroying one nest to stop exponential growth is a great investment, especially early on.
Note: I'm not an expert in this area, I'm mostly parroting stuff I read in other articles.
But those are species that don't have centralized nests.. This might be easier if you can trap them and trace them back to their homes..
No, they probably think that it is likely that, if that is not the case, it is likely to still be small enough that the progress can be significantly slowed by that means until a more complete solution is found.
Given that magnitude matters a lot and that it's a major threat to bee populations and through them much of the agriculture of the country, stalling tactics are a lot better than nothing.
Partially fill a shop vac with soapy water, stick the nozzle as close to the nest entrance as possible, then turn on the vacuum and hear the wasps get sucked into the machine as they try to enter or exit the nest. It takes a few hours, and potentially a couple of separate sessions to mop up any stragglers.
No fancy beekeeper suit necessary, and, best of all, no need to spread nasty poisons.
Seems like you'd just have a huge pile of mostly-alive wasps in your shop-vac.
I once blew a few hours to anxiously watching youtube videos of people destroying nasty wasp/hornet infestations. (I'm still not sure why. Probably some mix of morbid fascination and aggression fantasy.)
The soapy-water-shopvac trick appeared in a lot of those videos. (Less commonly: thermite, or quad-propeller drones.)
Soapy water is actually a powerful insecticide against many arthropods:
https://extension.colostate.edu/topic-areas/insects/insect-c...
We used a mix of vinegar, soap, and water in a spray bottle to rid our patio of earwigs this year and it seemed to work incredibly well. The insecticides we were spraying them with before trying the soap did absolutely nothing but cost $7 a can.
Does that perhaps depend on the species of wasp, or maybe the reach of the wand?
IIRC, there was one youtube video where the little bastards went straight for the dude's face during shop-vac'ing. He could smell the venom they were trying to spray in his eyes.
When one of the wasps (or hornets?) went straight for his GoPro sensor, its face filled my large monitor and I nearly had a heart attack.
https://youtu.be/1WkS5fyXDqU
What? have you seen size of that hornet? I am wearing space-suite if available.
My impression is that if you put a vacuum cleaner next to the entrance you may, if you're lucky, catch nearly all the wasps that leave the nest, but the queen never leaves the nest, and the eggs and larvae don't leave the nest, and I think there may also be some workers that stay in the nest looking after the larvae, so things will be quieter after you've finished vacuuming, but the colony will probably regenerate itself in a week or so.
With Vespex you don’t go looking for nests, you let the colony poison itself.
Because it is protein based and not sugar based, it’s not attractive to as many species. The downside is that the wasps only take it at a specific time of year - when they are consuming protein.
https://www.merchento.com/vespex.html
Professionals wear PPE because if you incur a low-probability risk every time you do X, and you do X often enough (because it's your profession), X will happen to you.
For example, if you have a 99% chance of nothing going wrong, and you do that thing 500 times, it's essentially guaranteed to happen (0.99^500 = 0.0066).
The stinging insect removal guys will be stung if they are in the profession for decades without PPE.
What? That seems crazy (and cool) to be able to create a tracking device light enough for a hornet to fly and still have enough battery to transmit even a periodic chirp.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=3sX7bmNv10c
This one is 3x11mm and weighs 0.15g;
https://atstrack.com/tracking-products/transmitters/product-...
It says it's light activated. So likely they've put a tiny light sensor in it that the microcontroller polls occasionally during the lowest power mode. That might be a tiny solar panel too. But using that to electrically drive an electronic power switch is tricky if you don't have the budget for a custom ASIC; if you don't have that budget, you'll add a decent amount of weight in a device that tiny.
Honestly, I'm not at all surprised that they've chosen to accept a short shelf life instead. It's pretty remarkable that they can squeeze that much functionality into a 11mm long by 3.5mm diameter cylinder.
All of this would add weight and size, and those trackers are really small and really lightweight. Judging by the photos, the battery is just hard wired to the circuit, and the whole thing is encapsulated with a thin layer of epoxy for waterproofing. That's by far the cheapest, easiest, and most reliable way to build something as lightweight as possible.
I wonder why its not just two interconnecting cylinders (using a tiny gasket) that you push together with thumb/finger when you want to activate/power the device.
Given that there would have been some serious engineering to think through the design there must have been trade-offs that I'm not considering though.
The scope of North America's invasive species problem is enormous. For many folks in urban areas, it's possible that you might go your whole day only encountering one native bird species (American Crow), but a whole host of invasive species (Rock Pigeon, House Sparrows, European Starlings).
History shows that early, active intervention can pay enormous dividends. For example, Alberta remains the only area in North America without non-native rats due to a major interventions: https://www.alberta.ca/history-of-rat-control-in-alberta.asp...
Washington State department of agriculture’s budget is public information; they spend about a quarter of a billion dollars a year on all their programs. I can’t imagine this particular operation is making much of a dent in that overall spend. According to the captions of those photographs, they have entomologists and pest control specialists on staff already. Salaries are also public. Sven Spichinger, shown in one of those pictures, Managing Entomologist, is on $87,000 a year - whether he’s hunting for murder hornets or not, presumably. There are three different levels of ‘Pest Biologist’ job in the department. It kind of looks like this is a project that is taking up the time of a few people who they already had on staff, to deal with exactly this kind of problem.
Does all government spending make you nauseous, or only when it’s visibly helping?
Also you could make a case that large houses with nice kitchens also have environmental costs to build and maintain, and living in small apartments with communal kitchens or restaurants nearby is better.
Most people end up leaving a lot on the table when eating out, and 100% of that food ends up in the trash / wasted.
If you want to save the environment, then you should reconsider your whole diet. Reduce meat intake and make smaller meals with more environmentally conscious ingredients(likely more expensive).
Regarding leftovers, plenty of people put restaurant leftovers in a container and take them home to eat later. The people who don't would likely waste food at home too.
This effort to destroy one hornet's nest probably had direct result of bringing someone a little closer towards having asthma and indirectly, through supply chain effects, costing a few dozen insect colonies, animals, and plants their lives somewhere else in the world.
Now that you mention it, it does make me a bit nauseated.
Or do you just generally like to bully anyone who challenges any form of government spending by attacking strawmen?
Though generally I'd argue both environmental and social concerns are underallocated relative to others.
If they get a second call which would require the engine, they didn’t want to risk having the fire personnel on scene in the little rescue truck and away from the engine, delaying response to the fire. (For the same reason, they wore the full turnout gear to support medical calls.)
There is probably more to it, but at least the way you describe it doesn't sound convincing.
Also I should add the in the previous cities I lived in they of course didn't do that. They just used small vans for medical emergencies. Originally when I moved here i thought it was burning a lot more when I saw all those engines on the street all the time, but it wasn't that.
My suspicion is that it's related to justifying having so much of the big equipment.
But if the big engines are overused too much they likely break down much faster too, driving a vicious circle of needing more and more of them, creating bigger budgets, more power for the fire chief etc.etc.
What equipment with what personnel is dispatched is incredibly complicated. You would be shocked. And most fire districts/departments regularly tweak their "response plans."
Maybe you’re right, though - the progressive militarization of state pest control departments during the global war on terror is probably one of the principal ways in which inequality is perpetuated in this country.
Are you suggesting the government of the State of Washington is responsible for providing food and basic sanitation in Los Angeles?
When I read the article I thought there are likely other nests nearby. Perhaps they should use some of the forestry budget to do a controlled burn in the area. It'll reduce severity of future fires and get any of any hornets nearby ;-)
If there's evidence of multiple other hives in the area, a controlled burn may get some of them, but the scope of the fire necessary could also be massive.
I'm not saying the option shouldn't be part of our arsenal. And if this is an area prone to wild-fires, then as you said it could assist there as well. However, I'm not sure it's a good option at this time, especially considering the side effects on other local indigenous species.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_giant_hornet
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'm not against government spending. I think there are plenty of problems that market forces alone cannot solve. I think the government should provide a solid safety net for its citizens. That is precisely why I lament the resources required for this. They are absolutely necessary, and at the same time it means there are fewer resources to go to other absolutely necessary needs.
I guess we could wish that the hornets never arrived here, but the life of a government is solving thousands of problems like these. If not the hornets, it would be something else. The uplifting moment is that this was a successful containment. Money well-spent :)
https://www.pinterest.ca/pin/657947826782505650/
I have no idea how accurate it is, of course.
https://www.vividmaps.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/rats-10...
https://vividmaps.com/global-rat-distribution-map/
Vividmaps.com is a great site.
Hemelin, Germany on the other hand only found a temporary solution to the problem when the anonymous Pied Piper visited the area. Perhaps he was unaware that some rats can swim up to a mile and simply drove the local rat population to the surrounding area. Regardless, the example clearly illustrates that music-based solutions to the problem are, at best, temporary.
I'm not suggesting it's bad or wrong to try, only whether there's evidence that the odds favor doing so.
https://html.duckduckgo.com/html?q=invasive%20species%20erad...
[1] https://entomologytoday.org/2019/03/08/invasive-species-succ...
Perhaps little hope for widespread eradication, but important areas can be cleaned up.
For these murder hornets, if we make a big up front investment in eradicating them now, there’s hope that we can prevent them from establishing themselves and becoming another perpetual battle.
well that's a little dramatic
2020: Surgical masks are a bit much to expect people to wear during a pandemic, Ebola has been circulating in Congo since 2014, and we'll need airtight space suits for a murder hornet outbreak.
Truly, the 90s were a simpler time.
Basically, since the 90s we've put a much much higher value on human life. I expect mask usage to extend far beyond covid and handshaking to cease being a cultural greeting.
COVID-19 has become more infectious over the course of the pandemic, with a strain that results in higher viral loads becoming predominant: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32697968/
It's hard to compare across countries. But mask-wearing Japan and South Korea have higher rates of flu and pneumonia deaths than the US/Canada/Europe: https://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/influenza...
As surgical masks are much less than 100% effective even in ideal conditions, let alone actual wear, it wouldn't be surprising if more usage of them would just be an evolutionary pressure for flu to have higher viral output. Quite similar to how widespread use of less than 100% effective anti-bacterial agents just results in bacteria evolving resistance, reducing the usefulness of those agents for the most vulnerable part of the population who need them most.
Possibly confounded by disparate population densities.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_depend...
Bangladesh also has a slightly lower flu/pneumonia death rate than Japan, even though it has 3x the density (though Bangladesh has a somewhat lower life expectancy (72) than Japan (84); Belgium, Netherlands, and Israel are all fairly close (80+) to Japan).
The world is significantly colder this year. I can't be the only one that feels it.
I find adults smiling to be gaudy and disconcerting, ever since I was a child. My wife included, although I like most of her so it's ok. Children don't bother me though, as it seems sincere.
I think they are just sting-proof suits.
Whatever happened with that? I haven’t heard about them in years.
Interestingly, that video suggests that some beekeepers actually prefer the aggressive, "africanized", bees as they can be more productive than less aggressive bees in the right situation. But they're a public health hazard, so most beekeepers choose to euthanize more aggressive hives to deliberately breed calmer, safer, bees.
This video also suggests that the high level of aggression wasn't optimal in at least some areas, so it's being evolved out and the bees are becoming less aggressive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psBomn2cPNw
I wander why they don’t just requeen?
Also, in the case of that video, IIRC having the still aggressive workers in the locations available to that beekeeper wouldn't be desirable, even if later generations were calmer.
The workers only start laying eggs if the hive goes without a queen for several weeks, and either way the eggs they lay are unfertilized and therefore cannot be raised into new queens. So requeening it is certain to work in that regard.
However, unless you euthanize whole hive, the aggressive drones will continue to live for a while and can mate with queens in neighbouring hives and spread the aggressive genes that way. So there is an advantage to euthanizing the whole hive instead of requeening it.
The drones in a hive are not all raised there, they move about hives, so killing the hive won’t get them all.
Hives that have got a laying worker are also very hard to requeen and it usually isn’t possible. One way is to shake all the bees out some distance away then hope the laying worker doesn’t make it back to the hive (she can’t fly). However those hives are hard to fix, as they usually reject the new queen.
There is a lot of differences in beekeeping region to region and country to country, so whatever I have seen and done may be very different to other places.
Yes, removing the genes is needed, but that can be done by killing the old queen, waiting a day then putting in a caged queen of known good genes. There is no need to kill the hive that I am aware of.
Requeening to correct temperament is part of beekeeping and killing the hive seems extreme. It is also wasteful of the equipment and comb because depending on the method used it won’t be able to be salvaged.
Killing hives is generally done by pouring petrol in the top then sealing the hive up, and is seen as one of the more humane methods. However I’ve only known this being done for American Foul Brood, not for temperament.
The improved temperament sometimes happens almost instantly, but is generally over a about a month as the workers die off. The total lifespan of a worker is only about 6 weeks in midsummer.
I keep bees, but in New Zealand an aggressive colony is a lesser beast than an africanised monster. I hope I’m missing something (eg what is africanised bees reject new queens, but I can’t find anything suggesting this is the case).
All children eventually become stronger than their parents, and most parents reap what they sow, and are treated a combination of how they treated their parents and their children.
In this case, our ancestors is all the other DNA-based life on earth, and our children are silicon machines.
Now, think about how we are treating the animals and also the machines (yelling at, cursing out, smashing, being very impatient with, expecting perfection)
The picture is downright scary.
Interesting. Why do they use red lamps?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhodopsin
What's interesting is the way that honey bees defend against them. A bunch of bees surround each hornet, then they intensify the flapping of their wings, which then generates enough heat to kill the hornet. In other words, the hornets are cooked alive.
European honeybees, which are used in most of the world, have no such defense mechanism and would indeed be helplessly slaughtered by these hornets.
I’d definitely advocate watching some YouTube footage about these creatures, they’re fascinating.
A fuckup led to the release of several of swarms of african bees which went on to crossbreed with local european honeybees, so africanised honeybees were not actually a human creation.
The result turned out to mostly take from their african ancestry: highly defensive, fast reproduction, readily swarming (or even absconding), way less picky about their nesting sites, … leading to high invasiveness.
AFAIK africanised honeybees are no worse than their african ancestors (though I'm not sure they're any better).
When I first heard about the hornet defense I wondered how on Earth the bees could've come up with that. But if they already clumped up for warmth it's a lot more scrutable.
The honeybees don’t just swarm the hornets, they will actually retreat into the hive and allow the hornets to enter, then trap them inside while they roast them to death. All of this works because the honeybees can vibrate themselves to a temperature just warmer than the hornets can tolerate, which is also just less than the bees can tolerate. Just one or two degrees celsius of tolerance is the difference.
Hopefully no Asian giant hornets ever evolve a slightly higher temperature tolerance!
Nature? You realize this almost certainly happened because of international travel/trade, right?
You mean hornets? Of course I know, but we can still adapt our consumption mode, honeybees are for what? honey mostly. We can also reduce planes travel, that wouldn't hurt as well
No, I mean this specific species of hornet suddenly appearing thousands of kilometers away. That wasn't nature, that was mankind's intervention.
Getting rid of them is hardly us 'dictating' things, it's restoring the natural order.
that sounds weird, of course human influence massively things, but you can't just decide on how to restore the "natural" state like this, it may be even worse by trying to do something brutally.
The good honeybees vs the bad hornets or wasps. It's much more complex. There are articles about how wild bees do a better job at pollination https://www.google.com/search?q=wild+bees+vs+honey+bees+poll..., wasps similarly play a huge role, for example with fruit trees (figs is the best example)
And, you know, pollinating all of the plants we use for food.
They're a major pollinator. Sure, there are others, but why would we risk adding more catastrophe when we've already wiped out such a huge number of insects?
It looks like in 2019 Vancouver island (which is huge) had a colony get eradicated, but otherwise haven't seen much else reported.
https://www.ontario.ca/page/asian-giant-hornets
While I’m at it, please allow me to remind everyone that there are thousands of solitary bee species in the world. They are the ones that go extinct or in real danger compared to our honey bees. There are many struggling beekeepers like me in the world, and we’re doing our best to keep our bees alive. But thousands of species are without keepers and they are dying. Please be gentle to the nature. Let them live.
(Edit: wondering how you can help, here's what I humbly suggested below in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24889023)
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/05/150524-bees-...
I have been guilty of that error countless times.
An individual's actions will not solve a society's woes, but they don't need to. If they help a little bit where they are, they can be worth doing.
Furthermore, individuals trying to help does not preclude larger-scale solutions. The people attempting individual actions could even contribute to the larger-scale or policy-based solutions.
Or, given that the described standpoint suggests I have enough attention for either planting a meadow lawn or supporting 'big action', why are you wasting it telling us about this, instead of naming names of the big actors to write to our representatives about and avoid electing representatives that hold a favorable position toward them ?
I'll just add two points:
1) Individual good actions virtually never outweigh large-scale bad actions, but the world is actually worse off if individuals do not take those little positive actions. Little polluter + big polluter yields more pollution than big polluter.
2) Taking the small positive actions is actually a lot of what helps people work on the huge, difficult problems. Humans are more effective when our psychology is a unified self rather than in conflict with itself, and taking small, positive concrete steps helps us keep ourselves in alignment with our big-picture goals and ideals.
I guess both of those fit into the abstract observation that you're bifurcating - people don't have to choose between individual concrete actions and contributing to policy efforts and other high-level approaches.
By all means, if you see someone explicitly saying they choose one at the expense of the other, say something.
When they don't say that, though, don't assume that's what they're doing.
There can be many reasons. The Varroa Mite [0] is one that we have to constantly fight against, these days. The mites don't kill the entire colony, but weakens it so much that the colony can't overwinter. Or there viruses [1] that deform the bees' wings that can debilitate the colony. There are also other problems that we don't see where I live, but other beekeepers have to fight, such as the Small Hive Beetle [2].
I suspect because of the ongoing wildfires and poor air quality in this region, one of my queens stopped laying eggs mid-summer, at a time when she normally lays 1,500-2,000 eggs every day. I had to replace her. I don't know if that colony is going to survive the winter.
Some other colonies had similar problems. Yesterday a beekeeper friend told me she lost a colony and she has another one on the brink of collapsing.
Then, we also don't know who is using what type of pesticides around here. Bees can forage anywhere in the 2-3 mile radius. It's near impossible for me to know what's going on in such a wide area.
It's a constant uphill battle.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varroa_destructor [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deformed_wing_virus [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_hive_beetle
Are things like the beetles and virus new introductions to the area, or is it just a confluence of factors that are hitting harder now?
I'd also heard (many years ago) that, while the colonies can collapse, the bees normally reproduce quickly enough that you don't see much of a net loss in colony counts year-over-year - how do you see that?
My impression is that the bee populations have been remarkably resilient year over year, but whenever I see this kind of stress-and-recovery cycle, I worry that there's a tipping point - many systems seem Fine under stress until they overwhelm their recovery mechanism and collapse catastrophically.
There is a tiny bit of information on them in german Wikipedia [0] (automatic translation [1], let me know if I can help with translation). Wikipedia says that they can be found worldwide, so maybe they will be of help.
(Please note that under _no circumstances_ this was meant as encouragement to introduce new invasive species to your area!)
Here is more information: the page of the beekeeper researching pseudoscorpions and bee interactions is at [2], [3] is about a book he wrote, called "Instruction manual for species-appropriate husbandry of bees and pseudoscorpions". A comment in [3] also suggests that under ideal circumstances, these pseudoscorpions might be able to deal with a small hive beetle.
This poster [4] states that having pseudoscorpions in hives unfortunately had no influence on varroa numbers, though.
[0] (german) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%BCcherskorpion
[1] (machine translation de-en): https://www.translatetheweb.com/?from=&to=en&dl=de&ref=trb&a...
[2] (german) https://beenature-project.com/epages/6aa71639-792d-4a95-9e8c...
[3] (german) https://bienen-nachrichten.de/2019/handlungsanleitung-f%C3%B...
[4] (PDF, english) http://apicultureconference2016.co.nz/wp-content/uploads/201...
The paper is a plasterboard jointing paper and 3-5 layers are sewn together and soaked in a solution of about 40% Oxalic acid, 60% glycerine. Used like conventional mite strips they need replacing more often but seem to work really well.
Randy Oliver has been trialing other delivery methods in California.
My hives are the best they have ever been this season, with a very strong start.
http://scientificbeekeeping.com/
The video's caption:
"Alright, here is what I want everyone to know about ‘murder hornets’. Only one nest of Asian Giant Hornets has been found in North America and it was quickly eradicated. Right now, the nation’s top entomologists are watching the situation and beekeepers like myself are not worried. If these hornets become a serious problem for honeybees, we will find a solution to keep bees safe.
If you really want something to be afraid of and if you want to know what keeps beekeepers awake at night, look closely at the bee in this video. You’ll see a dark, round speck on the side of her body. That, my friends, is something far more terrifying than these so-called ‘murder hornets’—it is a Varroa Mite. (Scroll through to see it up close.) The Varroa Mite is a parasitic mite that feeds on the fat bodies of bees and its decimating bee populations around the world.
At this point in time, Varroa Mites are a much greater threat to honeybee populations than Asian Giant Hornets and if they got the same attention in the press, maybe we would have a solution for them. Everyone now knows the term ‘murder hornet’ but the thing we should be talking about In the US is the Varroa Mite, a creature whose scientific name is literally ‘Varroa Destructor’.
Please stop the murder hornet hype and please start talking about the thing that’s killing more honeybees in the US than anything else right now—varroa mites."
[1] https://www.instagram.com/p/B_03jhvnFt6/
"If these hornets become a serious problem for honeybees, we will find a solution to keep bees safe."
It can easy be too late. Look at what's happening in Europe. They simply can't stop the hornets.
Of course it's more dramatic to show these huge insects. They are impressive and scary. Mites are small and look insignificant. They are not dramatic. They won't generate hype. I understand the frustration as a beekeeper, but don't let yet another problem become too big to reverse the tide on. It is obviously cheaper to deal with the hornets right now, hype or no hype.
Don't let murder hornets become the bee's new Coronavirus equivalent. It sounds like they're already dealing with plenty of pandemic-like issues as it is.
To quote George W Bush, who actually took pandemics seriously, "A pandemic is a lot like a forest fire. If caught early it might be extinguished with limited damage. If allowed to smolder, undetected, it can grow to an inferno that can spread quickly beyond our ability to control it."
So this, but with murder hornets.
How?
Or May be just look at what other Asian countries have done (outside of China) and look at what they did. It’s exactly everything the US did not do
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/times-watchdog/sin...
This seems contradictory to me as a beek. 5/16 holes as a mouse guard should also keep huge insects out of the hive. It also should be easy to create pheromone traps if it is true that the hornet's seek out the scent of other dead hornets.
On a side note, I see mites as a genetics issue. I would rather see commercial outfits using selection rather than treating with chemicals and shipping packages with weak genetics all over the US. Spearding weak genes is kind of the opposite of Darwin...
Drone entry/exit and blockages would be an issue after a period presumably.
I’m currently using some nice American made excluders and they are really nice. They are made of wire and are quite quite rigid.
My method has got pretty cheap - oxalic acid is about as cheap as it gets for treatments.
I can't help but think of when we only had one covid case and people said not to worry.
> Right now the nation's top entomologists are watching the situation and beekeepers like myself are not worried.
... and ...
> It’s going to disappear. One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.
Hasn’t officially launched yet, but the early trials are promising.
(Disclosure: I have advised the company)
Edit: I don’t understand the vicious pointless downvotes over this question.
How is that an easy connection? Your argument essentially says without bees then nature as we know it falls apart catastrophically - I am incredulous you could interpret this as obvious. Species go extinct all the time and yet Earth is still doing just fine, apart from the damage humans are doing to it.
> No pollinators
Bees are not the only pollinators
> leads to decreased germination
A decrease is not the same as elimination
> which leads to less food
A decrease is not the same as elimination
> for the lower levels of the food chain and on and on
Your argument is a about knock-on effects, which certainly exist. But you seem to think if any point in the chain breaks, it leads to ecological collapse. Why do you assume nature is so fragile? I am not a biologist and maybe bees are special or there is something I do not understand, but I certainly don't think it's an obvious conclusion.
You might want to investigate about the sparrows in china, quick version; a campaign to exterminate the sparrows to increase grain production ended up with famines.
In Europe it is..in fact it was the main-theme 3 years ago. And not just bees but insects overall...the honeybee was just the friendly looking ambassador for that message.
One small data point, but too many and too few are both bad. https://www.airborne.co.nz/pages/bee-keeping-statistics-new-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_insect_populations
You can learn about the wild bees in your region and understand what natural resources they thrive on. Some of them are so specialized that they can easily be threatened by the loss of habitat. Some of the bee "houses" can become great activities for children. For example kids can build Mason Bee houses and watch them attract bees.
Supporting local beekeepers and bee-friendly farmers.
By trying to keep an immaculate lawn or mosquito-free areas, most of us sacrifice the local insect population including various bees that are affected by those pesticides.
By spreading awareness, but also starting your own hive is a great hobby and it's quite affordable if you have the time. You don't even have to have them in your garden or balcony. You can speak to local farmers, and they can be happy to host your hive on their property. That's how I started.
I have a bit of garden but in the middle of a residential district of a city. Do I have any chance to attract bees or is
> starting your own hive
the only way?
If I had a bigger yard I would host a couple hives of my own, I love just sitting out in the flowers in the warmer weather and watching them forage.
I have no issues with neighbours and have somewhere between 3 and 6 hives depending on how you count. This is in a backyard of a suburban section. Preemptive honeystrikes may have helped - I get 150-250kgs of honey that it’s no issue giving it away and that seems to generate good will.
> the only way?
Not sure if I understand. I've also heard of schemes where you can sponsor a hive, but I've never tried it.
sorry I meant a continuation of your quote as part of of the question there: ie. "is starting your own hive the own only way?"
I've started to plant bee friendly flowers, but they haven't grown much. I'll continue again in spring.